WITH 

HPT TTYT-i "P 

ARMIES 



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ARTHUR STANLEY RIGGS 




Glass J}_k£L_ 

Book ■ \\ - ; 1 

Copyright^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



WITH THREE ARMIES 




His Majesty the King of the Belgians 

Photographed in Belgium, 1917 



With Three Armies 

On and Behind the Western Front 



By 
ARTHUR STANLEY RIGGS, F.R.G.S. 

i; 

Author of 

France From Sea to Sea, Vistas 

in Sicily, Etc. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS, 
CARTOONS, POSTERS AND PLACARDS 



INDIANAPOLIS 

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright 1918 
The Bobbs-Merrixl Company 



■'---•"*• - j 



-8 1918 



PRESS OF 

BRAUNWORTH & CO. 

BOOK MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN, N. Y. 



©CI.A501422 



n\ r I 



TO 

E. C. R. 

WHOSE FAITH AND VISION 
ALONE MADE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE 



INTRODUCTION 

Of books about the war there is no end. That is my ex- 
cuse for perpetrating one. Had there been one book, or 
even a dozen books, I should have hesitated long to thrust 
my effort into so select and easily identified a company. 
But the numbers that have appeared have included some 
so unusually hasty and badly done, I dare cherish hope 
for a comfortable nonentity such as the present volume. 

Moreover, the sanguine reader may be assured of certain 
soothing things. Here is nothing official. No luminary 
of any War Cabinet has endorsed anything I write, or 
prefaced it by any eulogistic foreword. The views pre- 
sented and the things seen are the views and observations 
merely of an ordinarily intelligent layman, not in the 
least concerned with the purely military or strategic aspects 
of the deadly game. 

To the average man, this war has brought a total revi- 
sion of thought. For thinking in regiments and batteries, 
he has had to substitute thinking in armies of millions 
and whole parks of artillery. For battles covering a con- 
ceivable area and a few days at most, he has had to hear 
of battle-fronts hundreds of miles long, and of conflicts 
dragged into months without cessation. All this has con- 
veyed to him one thing: monstrous size. Not having seen 



INTKODUCTION 

it himself, lie can not grasp it. Consequently, the war is 
emotionally nothing to him; it leaves him cold, chilled by 
its aggregate of horror. 

I have tried to do something different from the technical, 
philosophical and personal accounts which make np the 
bulk of the war books; tried to give a view broader than 
that of either the individual fighter, the strategist or the 
philosopher; tried, in a word, to bring the war home to 
the reader who may possibly be either too remote or too 
indifferent to realize from anything he has read hitherto 
how big and how small, how heroic and how bestial, how 
exceedingly far from and how crushed up against his very 
soul, this war is. In so far as I may have succeeded in 
this perhaps too daring task, the work will have been well 
worth while. 

In scant but hearty appreciation of the generous help 
given in securing much of my material, I am constrained 
to say only that I am under heavy obligations to the offi- 
cials of the Maison de la Presse, Ministere des Affaires 
Etrangeres, of Paris, to the Secretaries of Embassy in 
Paris, the Staff and other officers of the Erench, British 
and Belgian Armies under whose supervision my visits 
were made to the different fighting fronts, and to many 
others. I regret that the present code of the Allied Gov- 
ernments does not warrant me in naming the individuals 
to whom this debt of gratitude and appreciation is due. 



INTRODUCTION 

But they all, like the nameless soldiers and other persons 
who move with more or less reality through the succeeding 
pages, are playing the game in patient anonymity, satisfied 
to do their respective parts in laying, wide and deep, the 
foundations for what I believe from the bottom of my 
heart will be a peace that can and will prevent "any more 
war." Finis coronat opus! A. S. R. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Through Infested Seas 1 

II Behind the Front 20 

III The Armies on the Western Front .... 37 

IV Les Yankees and Their Special Providences . 54 
V The British in France: An Historical Contrast 68 

VI Along the British Front 83 

VII Farther along the British Front — And Be- 
hind It 98 

VIII Heroic Belgium 117 

IX Of All These the Bravest Are the Belgians . 131 

X The Psychology of the German Atrocities . 145 

XI Hate 159 

XII Reconstruction 178 

XIII French Schools in War Time 193 

XIV In the Blue Alsatian Mountains 209 

XV Alsace and Its Problems 229 

XVI A Saving Humor and a New Art 250 

XVII Left-Overs 265 

XVIII The Time Is Out of Joint — 283 

XIX Will the End Crown the Work? 294 



WITH THREE ARMIES 



WITH THREE ARMIES 



CHAPTER I 

THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 

The full blaze of an August Sunday — New York silent 
and deserted, save for the occasional trolley car half filled 
and rambling along without its usual air of desperate need 
for haste — the shimmer of heat waves rising from cobble 
and sidewalk — idle crossing police yawning at their posts 
— scattered pedestrians with their Sunday papers, and fam- 
ilies with baskets getting a belated start for "the Island." 

Even the great steamship piers looked bored. Outside 
stood a hundred motor cars. Around the entrance a man or 
two in uniform, some "Watch yer car?" boys, and a little 
knot of men and women were all that indicated the slightest 
activity. Within the huge, barn-like structures all was quiet : 
the elevators moved up and down silently, the few incoming 
passengers did little talking, and even the stevedores han- 
dling the last remaining barrels and crates, trunks and 
other baggage disappearing into the hatches of the great 
gray French liner which sizzled in the dirty green oiliness 
beside the pier were silent and careful. Going-away day in 

1 



2 WITH THREE ARMIES 

war time is not like similar occasions in the care-free days 
of peace. 

We all streamed slowly through the gate on the upper 
deck of the pier with a rustling display of passports and 
tickets, dock-passes and the like. Beyond, alongside the 
gangway giving upon the hot white deck of the vessel, 
ranged another fence, flanked by a row of tall desks at 
which United States Customs Inspectors wrote busily, 
pounded occasionally with rubber stamps, and asked grave 
questions. To pass that direct-eyed row of watchdogs, and 
their attendant satellites, lynx-eyed fellows who said noth- 
ing and saw everything, all one's papers and replies had to 
be in order. Again and again one replied or wrote state- 
ments as to birth, nativity, reasons for going abroad in war 
time, and so on; and the answers had to tally to the last 
dot over an i and the last crossing of a t. 

Outside this proscribed area stood the wives and mothers, 
sweethearts and friends of the travelers. A certain tense 
grimness inhered; the laughter was a little forced, and an 
air of anxious expectation mantled every one not actually 
going. The sprinkling of khaki and French horizon blue 
burned like Very lights in the dinginess of the vast pier 
shed. 

A hoarse whistle spluttered ; we passed on board, craned 
our necks to see those who felt sure they should very likely 
never see us again, and sought vantage points on the upper 
deck from which to stare back at them. Nagged out into 
midstream by the waspish tugs, we turned our majestic 



THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 3 

gray bulk slowly broadside to the pier. There they were 
— out at the end — a multi-colored blob: wives, sisters, 
friends, servants, longshoremen, framed by the slowly re- 
ceding pier's stark walls of corrugated iron and scaly drab 
paint. Handkerchiefs waved; a green parasol jerked up 
and down frantically in farewell signals. Through the 
glasses we could see them, these brave girls we left behind 
us, knew they were trying to smile even when they knew 
we could not see them. "We moved southward with reluctant 
slowness. The blob of colors became a mere fluttering, 
imagist speck of white against the ragged gulches and peaks 
of New York's architectural sierra. We caught our collective 
breath with a snort of the whistle, gathered speed, looked 
at one another inquiringly. 

Why were we all so different, yet so much like the trav- 
elers of peace times, going cold-bloodedly into the gravest 
dangers that ever beset people at sea ? The giant beside me 
who had come so much on the run he had forgotten to shave, 
this little, frail, middle-aged lady with thick eye-glasses 
and tremulous ringers, yonder rubicund pair in tweed caps 
and broad smiles — what reasons lay behind each purpose? 
What reason, rather. For, as we came in the ensuing days, 
of half guessed and little understood dangers, to know 
and value one another, the common purpose and nobility 
came forward modestly, but none the less surely. America ! 
Prance! Civilization triumphant! There was the reason. 
Whatever the ostensible excuse for embarking, the true 
purpose beneath was the desire^ passionately eager on #ie 



r 4 WITH THREE ARMIES 

part of some, dogged in others, unthinking or reasoned out 
■ — it all came to the one thing : each one would serve as best 
He or she might. 

As we moved down the harbor alone, the gay Coney 
Island steamboats, crowded with holiday-makers, saluted 
us with fluttering white greetings; but the silent vessels 
at anchor, which had come through the barred zones, 
stared in wordless, signless comprehension of our errand. 
Across our path in the lower Bay stretched a line of 
cylindrical white floats — the submarine and torpedo net. 
We passed through its open "gate" and out to sea. 
Definite safety lay behind us, the adventure before. On 
the forecastle head, unheeding anything but their grim 
preparations, four naval gunners in the chic striped blue- 
and-white jerseys, red-tufted tam-o'-shanters and tight 
blue uniforms of the French Navy, gave us a sudden, 
theatrical appreciation of what we were going into, as 
nothing else possibly could. 

Deliberately they stripped away the gray canvas cover- 
ing of the French Seventy-five. They oiled it, they tested 
its various training devices, they swung it to and fro and 
up and down, to make certain of its instant readiness. 
And then for half an hour the men passed up and down 
in stolid silence, between gun and magazine, carrying the 
businesslike gray shells and stowing them in their proper 
racks near the piece, whose threatening muzzle protruded 
over one bow. They moved with such precision and ease, 
they handled the deadly shells with such easy familiarity, 



THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 5 

that nervous little chills trickled up and down one's spine. 
Did not their ease and smoothness argue the same, or 
even greater discipline and swiftness on the part of the 
murderous pirates for whom they were preparing? No- 
body talked much about it, but every one who saw looked 
a little soberer for some time afterward. 

Outside Sandy Hook, rolling gently in the light ground 
swell, patrol after patrol, from the new, ugly motor craft 
to converted cruisers, ancient torpedo-boats and con- 
verted yachts, examined us with microscopic accuracy. 
Beyond, the lightship; later, the fading blue smudge of 
the Highlands; then the open sea. We began to unpack, 
to study one another, to squabble for places at the tables. 
For the moment, the tension was gone, and we chattered 
about lost baggage, the brilliant weather, where we should 
have our chairs placed, and who's who, exactly as a normal 
crowd of normal times would. 

"We were a motley throng indeed. A dignified French 
military commission, returning home after its work in 
Washington, made a bright spot of sky blue against the 
khaki of an American ambulance unit; a bevy of eighteen 
young women stenographers and clerks gathered hastily 
from heaven knows where and destined for the Eed Cross 
offices in Paris; three journalists; a small group of ladies 
of independent means going to make surgical dressings in 
a hospital in Paris; a Bishop in black clericals; a hearty, 
cheery, wholesome crowd of splendid Y. M. C. A. workers; 
and a scattering of other individuals gave us perhaps mere 



6 iWITH THEEE ARMIES 

character than ordinary. Unfortunately, some of this char- 
acter was bad. A few individuals on that ship were guilty 
of repeated indiscretions so flagrant they astonished the 
French officers and made every other passenger wonder 
why it was necessary, even at such a time, to select volun- 
teers apparently without thought or care. If America is 
to do her part in this war according to the best traditions 
of the country, it is a grave mistake to send any young 
man or woman overseas to represent us without first prov- 
ing beyond peradventure the applicant's character and be- 
havior. 

In welcome contrast to these were the Y. M. C. A. men 
and the Red Cross inspectors. Eor the Y. M. C. A. no 
praise can ever be regarded as payment for the work its 
members have done and are doing. The old idea that the 
organization is a namby-pamby, goody-goody club, with a 
dash of conventional religion thrown in to leaven the lump 
Has been thoroughly disproved by the war. In Russia., 
Serbia, Italy, Belgium, wherever the war has touched the 
raw of humanity, the Y. M. C. A. has gone with but one 
idea — service. Neither self nor sectarianism, neither dan- 
ger nor cost, neither frightfulness nor death has been able 
to stop these men, whose creed is humanity, whose idea of 
service is the limit of their powers. 

Came a week of calm, under bright skies and on smooth 
waters. Nothing happened, yet something happened every 
moment. Gradual efforts to settle down and study or work, 
crystallized in the Y. M. C. A. effort to learn college-yell 



THKOUGH INFESTED SEAS 7 

French, to the bewilderment of the French officers and the 
amusement of every one who already had a smattering of 
that exquisite tongue. Every morning at ten o'clock the 
Y. M. C. A. men, under the vigorous leadership of a former 
Professor of Theology in the University at Tokio, Japan, 
met in a circle on the promenade deck and studied French 
with all the zest of college boys learning to cheer their 
teams on to victory. The instruction was beautifully simple 
— so were the results ! 

Standing before the class, the cheer leader, book in hand, 
"lined out" a word or a phrase, repeating it until the class 
caught something at least of its pronunciation. Then they 
all yelled it in unison, to the time the leader kept with 
flail-like arms: 

Je prends V omnibus! 
Je prends V omnibus! 

Je prends, je prends, 

Je prends, je prends, 
Je prends V OMNIBUS! 

was a typical example that made the decks quiver, its for- 
tissimo declaration of "I take the omnibus" so conclusive 
no Frenchman could possibly doubt the intention of Mon- 
sieur VAmericain to take any omnibus he chose. 

The days passed. Those nervous women who, the first 
night out, slept in their chairs on deck, so they could be 
ready to pop into the boats at the first alarm, became less 
— well, emotional. The heat of the first few days gave 
place to the usual Atlantic chill, and then came the life- 



8 WITH THREE ARMIES 

belt drill, superintended in person by the liner's Captain, a 
French naval Lieutenant. 

Lined up on the promenade deck opposite our respective 
boats' numbers, we made a group any cinematographer 
would have given a month's pay to film for the "movies." 
Two journalists, both rotund as Bernini cherubs, raised a 
gust of laughter when they fastened on their belts in such 
a way that they could pose as the twins of a famous ad- 
vertisement. Even the rather grim-looking Captain had to 
laugh at their grotesque appearance as he went down the 
voluble line, tightening a belt here, hitching one up there, 
warning this lady that she must do so and so with hers if 
she did not wish to capsize and float feet upward, smiling 
good naturedly at the patent life-saving suits of rubber, 
with their pockets for food and their whistles to call help. 

Another day we had a war-fund entertainment with a 
tombola, or lottery, a charade in which the principal was 
one of the French officers — no mean actor, by the way — an 
American Ambulancier as prestidigitator, and an auction 
of all sorts of things, from American flags and handker- 
chiefs to bottles of champagne and boxes of cigarettes, 
which sold for figures that made war-time prices in the 
stores blush for shame. A pint of champagne at twenty dol- 
lars, and fifty cigarettes at ten were fair samples of the way 
the passengers chose to contribute to the fund. 

Our first real sensation, a- half-hour of excitement and 
wonder, turned afternoon tea cold and profitless with its 
sinister suggestion of some maneuver we could not under- 



THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 9 

stand. The day was brilliant and the sea smooth when, 
just after the stewards had finished inquiring "One lump, 
sir — cream ?" we sighted two west-bound vessels off the star- 
board bow. The one in the lead was an empty tanker, 
homeward bound for another cargo of the precious essence, 
the other a lofty-sided freighter of the usual type. 

While we watched, the big freighter began an astonish- 
ing series of evolutions behind and around the tanker, 
which moved at an unusually slow pace, if she were moving 
at all. Meantime, we wobbled about over half the compass 
ourselves, with the reinforced gunners standing to their 
piece in readiness, and the bridge fully alert. One or two 
of the older ladies, and a girl who had one of the patented 
life-saving suits, made ready to pop into their preservers 
at an instant's warning. That ungainly suit of rubber, 
with its catfish-like mouth yawning beside its owner's chair 
in a Gargantuan grin, made the preparations seem some- 
How inexpressibly droll and unreal. 

Around the deck pattered two barefoot sailors, saying 
never a word. But they let down Jacob's ladders beside 
each life-boat. More than anything else, that convinced the 
most hardy and skeptical of the nearness of something 
unpleasant. By this time our own ship and the freighter 
were near enough to signal intelligently, and in ten minutes 
things were at normal again, both ships on their courses, 
and the cold tea resumed amid excited chatter. That was 
what actually happened in every one's sight. What was 
afterward related, on the authority of every officer aboard, 



10 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

from the Captain down, constituted a volume of fables that 
would have made a telling sequel to Munchhausen — or 
"Doc" Cook! 

It was noticeable, However, that evening at dinner, that 
the Captain did not linger in his usual genial fashion ; and 
next morning, when we had penetrated the outer edge of 
the danger zone Germany has so thoughtfully marked out 
as a happy hunting ground for submarines, every boat swung 
outboard clear of its davits, the falls cleared, the gear all 
inspected and stowed in every boat, the life-rafts ready, 
and the long cases on the boat-deck, containing life-belts 
for the crew, opened and their contents laid flat on the 
flaps of the engine-room hatch, where they were instantly 
accessible. Aft, a life-raft on each side of the ship was half 
launched, thrusting its ugly catamaran snout far out over 
the rail, so that no matter how far the ship might list in 
the opposite direction, half a dozen lively men could thrust 
the raft into the sea, which lay almost as flat as a mill- 
pond. 

And that night danger passed close by us. Of course, the 
nearer we approached the French coast, the greater the 
danger, and the majority of the passengers slept, or rather 
lay and murmured uneasily, most of the night in their 
chairs, or paced monotonously up and down the throbbing 
decks. About eight o'clock the next morning, when I came 
up from my berth feeling very fit, I met one pallid speci- 
men. He was a big man, with a round face. Now, in the 



THEOUGH INFESTED SEAS 11 

chill of morning, his nose was pink, and he assumed the 
woebegone expression of a pitifully tired child. 

"Still goin' 'round and 'round and 'round/' he said 
weakly. "Began at dark last night. Are we afloat yet?" 

A long, low, dimly green line piped with white, resting 
upon a mysteriously intangible background of something 
neither sea nor sky nor land — France! And speeding 
straight out from it toward us, a knife-like slash of foam 
in the green and purple seas, below a taupe wisp of smoke, 
proclaimed the dirty gray little French torpedo craft sent 
to convoy us through the dangerous inshore waters border- 
ing the mouth of the river up which we were to steam for 
hours before reaching our dock. The iorpilleur swept down 
upon us majestically, circled once around to make certain 
of our innocence, drew off to one side and pulled ahead a 
little to lead the way. Scarcely had she taken position 
when in the farther skies appeared a pale yellow shape- 
lessness. Half an hour, and the yellow blur was a huge 
French dirigible hanging directly above us, a tremendous 
triple sausage of khaki, beneath which hung a gray and 
red car, spitting a rackety stream of thin gasoline vapor 
out behind as her propeller drove her at four times our 
speed. She could not hear the roaring cheers that surged 
up from our decks as the Ambulance and Y. M. C. A. con- 
tingents realized what she meant and was. In a few min- 
utes she was buzzing away again, lumbering through the 
hazy atmosphere like a huge bumble bee, hunting the 
waters for any sign of menace. 



12 WITH THEEE ABMIES 

"Well," remarked one American who had kept his knowl- 
edge to himself until after the convoys by water and air 
had appeared, "this convoy business is all right, of course, 
but it's not necessary. The French just do it to make us 
feel safer. The fact is — I got this straight, and I know it's 
so — the Germans own so much stock in the French steam- 
ship lines that they don't try to torpedo any of their ships. 
Just throw a little scare into 'em now and then, but no 
harm meant." 

How a near-sighted submarine could distinguish between 
a favored French ship and a vessel of some other country 
at night or in a storm apparently did not enter into the 
calculation. 

Up the river we steamed, past little towns apparently 
untouched by war, moving slowly through the loveliness 
that only rural France can display, coming with the dark- 
ness to the great seaport where we were not yet expected, 
and few preparations had been made to receive us at the 
crowded wharves. Whenever we were within hailing dis- 
tance of either bank, the more enthusiastic ambulance men, 
Y. M. C. A. boys and others roared out their good will and 
sympathy in sheer animal spirits and delight to the silent 
and amused peasants along the shore : 

"Veev-a law Franssss! Ton- jours! Tow- jours veev-a law 
Franssss!" 

On the outskirts of town, clustered along the river-bank, 
are the buildings of a great camp of German prisoners. As 
the boys saw the unexpected blond faces and field gray of 



THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 13 

the Germans inside the wire stockade, their cheering died 
as abruptly as if it had been choked off. An instant later 
a deep growl ran along the rail from bow to stern. We 
passed the camp almost in silence. Not quite . . . One 
civilian went about from group to group on the promenade 
deck, always asking the same plaintive question : 

"Haven't got an automatic in your clothes, have you? I 
may never get such a good chance again at those d — d 
Heinies !" 

I had wished from the beginning of the war, if I could 
not serve in it myself, to know exactly what was happening 
"Over There," and also what happened on a trip across at 
such a time. Now I knew about the trip, and, given any 
credentials at all, it seemed very easy to reach the war zone. 
What happened in the thrilling, inspiring, soul-awakening 
months that I was able to spend on and behind the actual 
western fronts themselves, form the chapters that follow 
this one. By a strictly orderly procedure, I should leave 
the return voyage for the last chapter. But to keep my final 
pages clear for the far more vital considerations with which 
I hope to fill them, and to afford a convenient comparison 
between the voyage across, to France, and the return voy- 
age, by way of England to the United States, it seems 
wisest to sketch that final trip here. 

Easy though it was to reach the war zone, when the time 
came to go home, I found it anything but easy to leave. 
The beloved French police, who had been loath to receive 



14 WITH THREE ARMIES 

me, who had made me swear to having been born, and to 
being alive, to being married yet to being alone in France 
when I arrived, now seemed equally loath to let me go. The 
difficulties they interposed are perfectly reasonable in time 
of war but none the less trying to any one in a hurry. I 
had to obtain their permission to leave France; then the 
permission of the American Consul in Paris to leave 
France; last, but most vital of all, permission from the 
British military authorities in France, to leave France, and 
to enter England. The story of the tribulations of any one 
attempting to secure these different permissions in haste 
Would fill a quarto, and perhaps give the German himself 
some new ideas for frightfulness. 

That was only the beginning of my troubles, for at the 
French Channel port of embarkation, suspected by the 
British local authorities established there of being some 
sort of an undesirable, perhaps because I had confessed to 
having come over for what my passport designated as "lit- 
erary work," I was given opportunity in the quiet loneli- 
ness of a thinking-chamber to speculate on "After Death — 
What?" When I had stewed miserably in my own juices 
for half an hour or so, a thin-faced and stern-looking man 
entered, looked me over, and began a questionnaire that 
lasted long and left me to wonder what I really had been 
doing! At last he laid down my papers and remarked 
dryly: 

"This is very interesting, sir, but — of course, you can 
prove it all . . ." 



THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 15 

"Prove it ?" I echoed feebly. "No, I don't believe I can. 
Here are all the other papers I have. If they won't do, 
please communicate with our Embassy in Paris by tele- 
phone." 

My questioner looked over the additional documents, 
handed all my papers back and signified that I was not to 
be shot this time. Moreover, he apologized for having 
"upset" me by the somewhat formidable ordeal. As I was 
going out of his door, having a hard time to move in de- 
corous fashion, he called, in the most casual tone imagin- 
able: 

"Oh, by the bye — you don't recall going anywhere with 
a Mr. Blank, do you ? Know anybody by that name ?" 

Fortunately I didn't, for I rose to his bait. It sounded 
so plausible: a gentleman inquiring after somebody he 
knew. . . . War is full of inquiries like that. 

"Why, no, not that I remember. I don't recall anybody 
by that name, either. Why ?" 

"Oh, nothing, only — we'd like jolly well to meet Mr. 
Blank here," was the grim and meaningful answer, as the 
thin gray lips came together sharply. 

Ten minutes later I was standing at the opened port of 
my cabin on the cross-Channel steamer, tearing up and 
throwing overboard what I assume was a perfectly innocent 
letter given me by a French Foreign Office official to post 
in America to his wife. At the moment the British official 
asked the routine question : "Have you any correspondence 
with you?" I had forgotten that letter. When I remem- 



16 WITH THKEE ARMIES 

bered, it was red-hot and as big as a pet corn in a new shoe ! 
Having once said I had nothing, if I went back and gave 
up that letter, no matter how innocent it might prove, I 
should be in for a thoroughly unpleasant second question- 
naire and a search so thorough that it would uncover even 
my dreams. But I need not violate the law; I tore up the 
missive and dropped it into the sighing waters alongside. 

Our little procession that night consisted of two hospital 
ships full of wounded going to Blighty, our own ship, and 
the usual convoy of destroyers. The weather was good for 
submarining, rainy, blowing half a gale, and black as a 
pocket. The enemy could creep up and wait in our path 
unobserved. But we had little anxiety, so thorough has 
been the scouring the British destroyers and trawlers have 
given the Channel lanes, and so constant is the watch kept 
upon them by sleepless eyes. 

The same is true of the inshore waters off the English 
west coast, from which, half hidden in the drizzle of a chill- 
ing fall rain, on a nameless American liner, we put out into 
the river, lay at anchor a whole day speculating and finally 
slipped off at daylight when the coast was reported all 
clear. What a day that one of swinging at anchor was ! 
Submarines outside — a new liner not yet on her maiden 
voyage but merely coming from the yards, torpedoed and 
destroyed — an American destroyer sunk — two big passen- 
ger liners sent to the bottom, one visible from our ship 
when we passed its location. Rumor was busy indeed. But 
we were on the home stretch, we had all of us seen mucH 



THROUGH INFESTED SEAS 17 

and learned more ; we were on an American ship with a vet- 
eran crew. Every man of that crew had been through at 
least one previous torpedoing, blow-up or wreck of some 
sort — reassuring, that ! It was more reassuring to know our 
own destroyers were scurrying to and fro outside, combing 
the waters for our safety. 

An American ship, and American guns — and such guns ! 
Here was not one graceful and delicate, hard-hitting but 
diminutive Erench Seventy-five, but four powerful six- 
inchers, one on each bow and stern, so delicately balanced 
they swung to a touch, and manned by gunners who might 
be green at war but who nevertheless actually stood on the 
mountings with hands ready to training gear and breech- 
block, and eyes that never ceased for a moment to sweep the 
wild tumble of waters. Day and night those gun crews 
stood by, not in a vague notion of being on hand if any- 
thing turned up, but hunting for trouble as a cat hunts in 
a stubble-field for mice. England may gibe gently at the 
grim and businesslike air of our boys as indicating their 
rawness to the game of games, but the hope of every one 
who has seen them at work is that they may never lose one 
jot of alert and eager readiness. 

The ship herself was not painted a uniform war gray, 
but with a bluish-gray as a background, she was literally cov- 
ered, hull, superstructure, funnels, spars, boats, everything 
with bilious green and red-lead squares, set diamondwise 
— camouflage at sea. When coming aboard a young aero- 
plane engine expert, with the rank of a Lieutenant- 



18 WITH THREE ARMIES 

Commander of the Royal Naval Reserve, shivered at this 
hideous pleasantry, and all the way across missed meals and 
kept away from the bluest part of the smoking-room. 

We were convoyed by a lumbering old merchantman eon- 
verted into an armed cruiser, and by two swift American 
destroyers which tumbled about in the rough sea until they 
seemed so many frisking dolphins rather than armed ves- 
sels. They rolled until we could see their keels ; their fun- 
nels seemed to lie flat along the smother. They dove half 
out of sight into solid masses of grayish green, to be thrown 
quivering back on their haunches next minute, out of the 
water as far aft as the bridge, trying to roll over and go 
down stern foremost at the same time, corkscrew fashion. 
Our good ship Camouflage tumbled about in lively fashion, 
too, and our lumbering cruiser companion showed her red 
bilges with pendulum-like regularity. 

Aside from the rough weather at first, it was a very dif- 
ferent voyage from the journey over — no excitement, no 
tension, except one morning when one of the gunners whis- 
pered to the Navy Lieutenant who was watching our game 
of shuffleboard. 

"Huh ? Right ! Stand by ! I'll get my glasses !" he re- 
plied, and Vanished. 

Every one who heard hurried forward to a vantage point 
behind the big six-incher, whose crew was already keeping 
it trai'aed on a faint black smudge on the horizon. With 
every roll and heave of the steamer the muzzle of that gray 
monster followed the distant target unerringly, the men at 



THKOUGH INFESTED SEAS 19 

tlieir stations, the doors of the shell-room open, everything 
in readiness for the command — that did not come. The 
smudge became one ship, two ships, a whole fleet — a convoy 
of troopships and supply and munitions vessels, led by a 
protected cruiser. A brief command barked from above re- 
leased the eager men and left the gun to swing only with 
the drunken roll of the vessel, but the thought voiced by a 
gray-haired skipper of the E. N. E. was in every mind as 
we watched: 

"Smart lads, those ! HI wager they had the range first !" 

Nothing more of any interest happened except the 
Sunday morning service in the saloon, when a steward 
whose hearing was not quite the equal of his musical educa- 
tion played the hymns, and our good Bishop, he with whom 
I crossed on the French vessel, addressed us informally 
but with an impressiveness that found every one. 

And then — home, safety, families, everything in the dusk 
of early dawn, with the chilly waiting at the protective net, 
at Quarantine, the slow progression up the harbor, and a 
British officer who had never been in America before, ask- 
ing plaintively : 

"I say, old chap, does your Statue of Liberty thing really 
show so we can see it from the ship ?" 



CHAPTER II 



BEHIND THE FRONT 



"Sat, New Yo'k, did France usetuh look like this befoah 
the wall?" asked the soft voice of a Georgian Y. M. C. A. 
man as we leaned over the rail watching the exquisite pano- 
rama flow past. "Some country," went on the voice, mus- 
ingly, without awaiting any reply, "if it's all as suah- 
'nough good as this end. Don't wondeh the Fritzes wanted 
to hog it for 'emselves — an' the French to hang on to it !" 

It is all as good as the southern "end." Never had 
France appeared lovelier than on that August afternoon 
when the steamer wound her way slowly up the placid river, 
through fields untroubled and mellow in their summer 
maturity; beside sleepy little medieval villages plumed 
with the slowly rising blue smoke from a chimney; past 
stretches where the rustling mimosas and rushes made a 
rich green arras flung over the banks. So far as the un- 
aided eye could see, here was no smitten land, bleeding in- 
ternally, sorely pressed by a voracious and conscienceless 
enemy. Under the soft and hazy sky sturdy figures moved 
about the broad acres, horses drowsed in the shade or 
plodded patiently along chalky white roads, bordered by 
willows and poplars glistening opal and malachite in the 
thick sunshine. Children played happily about their doors, 

20 



BEHIND THE FBONT 21 

and the riverside markets in the little towns threw us 
strong gleams of color — many-faceted gems that refracted 
the light with prismatic richness. 

What the eye did not see at our distance was that the 
sturdy figures in the fields were those of broad-backed 
young women or stooping ancients; that the horses were 
ancient, too, and some of them scarred; that the children's 
happiness was a silent happiness, if, indeed, it could be 
given that old, joyous name at all ; that the vegetable mar- 
kets were brilliant with color because there was no crowd- 
ing throng to hide the gay hues of the carrots and beets, the 
silver green of lettuce and cabbage. For young France, 
aye and middle-aged France, too, still lies out under the 
star-shells of that mysterious region, the Front, plowing 
with something that cuts deeper and more fiercely than a 
plowshare, and reaping with something that harvests more 
than sun-tanned wheat. 

Notwithstanding her losses, France is neither defeated, 
depressed nor in the last ditch. Mourning she wears, but 
she wears it with the pride of high privilege, not the de- 
spair of utter loss, with the surquidant air of one who has 
been decorated. To one who had hardly dared think about 
a France garbed in black, her spirit was a revelation, and 
the mourning itself not nearly so depressing as imagined. 
Weary France is of the war, weary to the point of utter 
revulsion; but disgust does not mean disinclination to 
fight, and France will go on, if my knowledge of her, ex- 
tending over many years, is at all reliable, until the Hun is 



22 WITH THREE ARMIES 

beaten decisively or there are no more Frenchmen left to 
fight him. The spirit and power that enabled France to 
retreat and retreat nntil the vantage ground of the Marne 
was reached, without losing morale; the spirit that fired 
the Army and urged it to victory in the terribly bloody 
field of the Somme; the spirit that made good Verdun's 
heroic cry of On ne passe pas; the spirit that is now, in 
1918, keeping many a soldier in uniform notwithstanding 
a missing arm or leg or eye, is not the spirit that yields. 
Determination without hope often saves the day; but in 
this case the feeling of France, of all the Allies, is one of 
something more than hope : it is certainty. 

They look to America. They are certain now that the 
forces of decency and right will win, because we have 
thrown our vast resources of man power and materiel into 
the scale in such a way that all Europe knows we really in- 
tend to do our part and see the fight through. Before we 
began to show actual results, the world was inclined to 
take the German view of our declaration of war — mere 
camouflage* to hide commercial intentions. To-day the peas- 
ant in the field will shake his grizzled head and pull deep 
on his cigarette with the wise air of one who always said 
it — "Ah, but yes; that America! It is well." And the 
women look up from their sewing or their babies to nod and 
smile : "That brave America ; she is with us, non f 

That southern city where we landed has the lines of 
war graven deep on its gray old face, usually so smiling 
and benevolent. Here, as in all the other war ports, the 



BEHIND THE FEONT 23 

old, placid life has been uprooted with a jerk, and in its 
place is a stream of men, guns, supplies ; a tide of strange- 
looking foreigners, horribly in earnest and with not an in- 
stant to waste upon conversation; a sense, on the part of 
the inhabitants, of vagueness, of being lost in a maelstrom 
of something they could not grasp even though they knew 
all about it, and consequently a yielding that seems to the 
thoughtful stranger a little inert. 

The rail journey from the sea to Paris is a constant repe- 
tition of the vistas along the river : sweeping landscapes as 
warmly lovely and as sympathetically tinted as though the 
hectic colors of war were on the other side of the world, in- 
stead of next door. It was impossible to realize, before see- 
ing the battle-fields and trenches, that these sunny acres 
and quiet towns and contented streams had been saved 
from the Hun cure-all of SchrecMichTceit by the closest of 
margins. 

Paris ! What untraveled American boy of all our vast 
expeditionary forces, be he officer or man, does not look for- 
ward to seeing the lovely siren of the Seine? And with 
what assurance does not the lucky chap who has been on 
duty there talk of his experience, self-consciously familiar 
with the famous restaurants and hotels, museums and gal- 
leries, boulevards and bridges ? To hear such a one lectur- 
ing to a less fortunate companion, who listens respectfully 
and shoots avid questions .back, is a treat. Often the queries 
would be almost unanswerable for a Parisian born, but the 
soldier who has been there is a veritable compendium of in- 



24: WITH THEEE AEMIES 

formation, and has, moreover, an imagination typically 
American. 

Paris is still Paris. Nothing, apparently, can ever wholly 
transform the eternal spirit of youth that keeps this mar- 
velous capital perennially fresh. True, her lights are 
dimmed, her wounds many and grievous, her shops are 
closed ! Only a few of the many, to be sure, as one scans 
the long streets, but enough to give us the notion of what a 
war like this in the United States would mean, with fronts 
boarded up and quaint notices pasted for the information 
of customers. On one Parisian milliner's shuttered win- 
dows is a neat sign: "Owner away. Studying German 
styles. Will reopen at the end of the war with a complete 
new line." Will he? is the thought that strikes every 
one after the gay, almost impudent humor of the notice has 
passed. Another store bears the inscription: "Office now 
with the — th Infantry at the Front. Customers will 
kindly be patient until the end of the war and our reopen- 
ing." 

That dingy sign, faded with its three years of exposure 
to the weather, carries the motto of all France: patience. 
Every one in France is patient, even in the jammed 
"Metro" on a wet night when the shops have closed and 
feminine Paris is set free. The New York Subway itself 
is no more crowded or busy. There is this difference : how- 
ever jammed together the Parisian crowd may be, nobody's 
clothes are torn off, and nobody yells "WatchyerstepwatcK- 
yerstep! Plenty oroomupfronttliere!" or puts a knee in 



BEHIND THE EKONT 25 

some one's back to squeeze the helpless inside that men- 
acing guillotine-like door with the mighty spring. Every- 
body is good-natured to the soldier, too, even when, mud- 
died with the clay of the trenches and bulging in fifty 
places with equipment and the most unimaginable sorts of 
packages, often with a wine-bottle sticking its red neck out 
of a pocket at a bayonet angle, he inserts himself heavily 
into an already full car. A dainty skirt may be pulled 
aside a little, or a fragile hat tilted away from the heavily- 
burdened soldier, but there is no protest, even in the heart. 
And the soldier to-day in Paris is legion. Not a house 
but has its poilu. Sooner or later they all come home to 
spend their permission, and we see them everywhere. Some 
of them come on their backs, alas, to be swallowed up in 
the vast, quiet hospitals, whence they generally emerge a 
little whiter, a little quieter than when they entered. Then 
the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries Gardens, the Grands 
Boulevards and the little squares and parks about the Inva- 
lides, see them sunning themselves or resting upon the 
benches. A sad spectacle? No! The mutiles are not sad 
themselves, and they would properly resent our being sad- 
dened by their appearance; but they accept attention gra- 
ciously. The crossing police are very gentle and tender 
with them, and the flying street traffic stops to let them 
pass — the only living beings, perhaps, who ever halted the 
turbulent flow of the Paris streets ! In the vast courtyard 
Of Napoleon's ancient Hopital des Invalides, where the 
myriad trophies wrested from the boche have been gathered, 



26 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

unmarked convalescents and limping mutiles solemnly in- 
spect the guns, the aeroplanes, the shells and other devices 
of modern warfare, sometimes explaining them with care- 
ful simplicity to admiring civilians. 

Paris unchanged, did I say? Not altogether: she has 
become quieter in some ways, noisier in others. Her old 
brilliant colors have toned down — the women dress soberly, 
though without having lost their chic. By day the city's 
appearance conveys little out of the ordinary — except that 
the French, who in other days used to make us leap for 
our lives in crossing the streets, and arrested us for inter- 
fering with the traffic if we were run down, now themselves 
leap quite as frantically when they hear the imperious 
klaxon of an automobile driven by a soldier-chauffeur in 
the American khaki ! The streets are tawny with khaki, 
kaleidoscopically tumbling with the tall, sturdy figures of 
the striding British and their Colonials, springy Amer- 
icans, swaying Highlanders in tartan and sporran, huge, 
fawn-uniformed Russians, gray Italians with starred col- 
lars and soldierly carriage, stocky little Portuguese and 
lean, melancholy Serbs. Decorations and orders blaze on 
every breast. The French aviators, in their horizon blue 
fatigue uniforms or the black and scarlet of other days, 
are the most modest and reserved of all, with probing eyes 
that look through the streets and their denizens into those 
far, aerial, boundless spaces where Bergsonian time is the 
measure of life. Slender boys they are, generally, with 
sensitive faces and fingers, yet gifted as no others are with 



BEHIND THE FBONT 27 

the storied impassivity of the gambler, yielding to no shock 
and impervious to everything but the praise they shun. On 
their narrow chests, not yet the rounded shapes of full- 
grown men, burn the medals which tell of those frightful, 
whirling, upside-down and inside-out combats where death 
plays hide-and-seek with men through dank clouds of 
vapor: the dull green and bronze of the Croix de Guerre, 
the scarlet of the Legion d'Honneur, the green and gold of 
the Medaille Militaire. The people know these silent fig- 
ures, and worship them. Artillery, infantry, tankmen, the 
"Mopping-up>" daredevils, all these have their meed of 
gratitude and praise; but the flying man whose seat is 
between the wings of death itself, whose voice is the whip- 
lash staccato of the machine-gun — he is the idol. 

For days after Captain Guynemer, the "Ace of Aces" (the 
French system of rating in the air service counts a man an 
Ace when he has been officially recognized as the proved 
destroyer of five enemy planes), had been shot down in 
Belgium, those of us who knew of his fate dared not 
breathe it. We watched with interest the anxiety of the 
crowds to know why he, whose Croix de Guerre ribbon had 
had to be lengthened again and again to accommodate the 
fifty palms and stars which bespoke his victories, was no 
longer mentioned. We saw that copy of Excelsior, with a 
short poem-requiem dedicated to an unnamed hero of the 
air; we felt the restlessness of spirit it evoked. Men stood 
on the street corners to read it, and shake their heads as 
they asked themselves anxiously: "Est-ce not* Guyne- 



28 WITH THREE ARMIES 

mer?" When the sorrowful news was published officially, 
all Paris, yes, all France, mourned for the gallant and in- 
extinguishable spirit upon whose shattered machine the 
German aviator who had brought him down is said to have 
dropped a commemorative wreath. 

The reserve and modesty which so endear the flyers to 
the people was characteristically shown by Guynemer. Re- 
plying to his father's demand for his first impressions on 
arriving at the front, he wrote his thought back in tele- 
graphic style : "No impressions ; curiosity satisfied/' 

Shopping is still a matter of some difficulty and perplex- 
ity for the alien. Never having ourselves experienced the 
nightmare through which France has been compelled to 
pass, it is hard for Americans to understand certain rules 
regarding the purchase of ordinary necessities, and amus- 
ing — provided one is philosopher enough to have cultivated 
a decent sense of humor — to be entangled in the personal 
interpretations of the different shopkeepers. 

On arriving in Paris without camera or typewriter, which 
the French officials in New York warned me might occa- 
sion me a deal of trouble, my first inquiries elicited the 
fact that I might have both. A kodak was speedily acquired, 
but films were another matter. The Government regula- 
tions restrict imports practically to supplies contributing 
directly to the life of both military and civil population. 
The Kodak Company, having a stock of films sufficient for 
about ten months only, and being unable to obtain any 
more in the immediate future, refused to sell any one more 




An observation balloon 




Group of aviators with the late Lieutenant Guynemer, the 
famous French Ace, in the center 



BEHIND THE FRONT 29 

than a certain limited quantity during any given week. 
As for a typewriter, there were plenty of the ponderous 
desk machines to be had; but the little portable ma- 
chines — ! After some hunting, the store where they were 
sold was located, and a machine reposing in the window 
proved that there was at least one unsold. I might as well 
have offered money for salvation ! 

"But no, Monsieur," cried the chic little woman in 
mourning who tended the shop in her husband's perpetual 
absence. "I have only this one. I can not sell it. I will 
take your order. ... I should have some machines in 
— well, perhaps next spring." 

"Sorry, Madame, but that won't do. Can't you rent it 
to me ?" 

She shook her head in surprise. "Eent ? No, indeed ! I 
must have it in the window so I can sell others — if the 
Government ever lets me import any more." 

Premiums, arguments, cajoleries had no effect. That 
machine must remain in the window, earning nothing and 
slowly deteriorating, as an advertisement for typewriters 
she will not have for many long months to come. 

In a haberdashery on one of the Grands Boulevards an 
English clerk sold me some Scotch lisle at an outrageous 
price, with the naive explanation: "Oh, I know it's 'igh, 
sir, but you see, sir, the French Gov'm't won't let us im- 
port Tiany more, so we 'ave to put the price up so 'igh we 
can keep it all for customers as wants Zionly the best !" 

Subsequent experience seemed to indicate that he had 



30 WITH THKEE AKMIES 

voiced the opinion and attitude of all shopkeepers. Many 
hotel-keepers follow the same pleasant scheme, and are 
pained when one demands the ordinary comforts of other 
days : oatmeal, for instance. My hotel had none and would 
buy none. None was to be had in Paris — there was no de- 
mand for it — in war one does not eat oatmeal ! But the 
war bread lay soggily upon my pampered stomach, so I 
tramped a mile to a German delicatessen (it has changed 
proprietors and nationality, it is said, but not its name), 
paid fifty cents for five cents' worth, and gave it to my 
Greek floor- waiter. "Ah, yes, Monsieur got it, didn't he? 
I knew he could !" exclaimed the unblushing rascal. How 
that oatmeal vanished ! I must have had the appetite of a 
whole battalion. 

With a considerable part of the foreign population and 
a certain element of the French themselves, there is no 
lack of money, nor of the inclination to spend. The fa- 
mous restaurants, such as the Cafe de Paris, Prunier's, 
Ambassadeurs, Grand Vatel and others; tearooms like 
Eumpelmayer's ; expensive establishments of every sort, in 
fact, are lavishly patronized. Most of the money; I should 
say, goes for food and drink. It may be the only solace of 
a warring people: certainly the world does look brighter 
after a plenteous and soothing dinner, with immaculate 
settings and perfect, silent service. Nevertheless, to the 
thoughtful American, knowing the appeals made from 
Prance for help, knowing the millions that have been sent 
over from our full purses to help the stricken and the 



BEHIND THE FRONT 31 

Homeless, the flaunting prosperity of such establishments, 
with women in diamonds and costly furs, and men in eve- 
ning dress, all waiting in line for a chance at a table, is a 
discordant note worthy of America itself. I remarked 
upon it to a Erench friend, when we were dining one eve- 
ning in one of those very places. 

Characteristically he shrugged, and considered lovingly 
the sole before him in its rich golden sauce. 

"Eh, hien, my friend. The rich! They spend. Sapristi! 
How should the world know they are rich if they do not 
spend? America sends nothing for them. They are not 
like us; they live in a different world from us human be- 
ings. We have hearts, they have stomachs !" 

It is when Paris wraps her veil about her raven head for 
the journey through the twelve realms of the night that 
she is most impressive. 

The gray dusk falls almost palpably upon the thronged 
Grands Boulevards and in the swirling human eddies about 
the "Metro" kiosks, which proclaim themselves in letters 
of vivid green. It trickles steadily down from somber 
eaves and awnings, to coagulate under the trees and about 
the newsstands like a heavy gas through which men and 
women walk only half discerned. Shops put up their cur- 
tains or pull down their iron shutters with a clang. Lights 
begin to glow feebly out, not yet illuminating, but merely 
intensifying the dark behind and about them. Over- 
head, the hooded street lights are turned on, cutting pyra- 
mids of feeble radiance through the solid black of the 



32 WITH THREE ARMIES 

night. The whole city hums with going-home and closing- 
np activities. It is not, however, the high, stridulous note 
of other clays, but a concentrated buzz, a monotone that 
breathes the soul of the city and its untiring endeavor. 

An hour later the quiet of a country town reigns, save 
for the blatant honk of the decrepit old taxis — little one- 
and two-cylinder affairs relegated ages ago to the scrap 
heap, and resurrected only when all the efficient motors 
were demanded for war service — as they pant and stutter 
their tin-panny way past corners unlighted and dangerous. 
And now one can hear a different buzz. Thousands of feet 
overhead, circling like eagles above their nest, mighty pro- 
tecting aeroplanes wing purringly, and the pedestrians 
look up thoughtfully, to make certain of the red eye which 
glows reassuringly down upon the slumbrous city below; 
the sign visible of safety for the helpless millions spread 
along both sides of the silver Seine. 

Out by the ancient city fortifications there are guards 
by day also : fat, pursy observation balloons floating at in- 
tervals along the northern front, watching ceaselessly for 
the terror that no longer flies either by night or by day* 
against the uncaptured city, while in the vast dry moats 
the peasant women tend their vegetable gardens, and sol- 
diers en 'permission snore peacefully in the sunshine 01 
ramble about the grassy glacis. 

In towns where there is any possibility of danger, or 

* This was written before the renewal of air raids, which 
commenced the night of January 30, 1918, after the lapse of 
six months. 



BEHIND THE FEONT 33 

where there are military depots or stations of importance, 
the darkness at night is appalling. The people feel their 
way stumblingly, bump into one another, trip on unex- 
pected irregularities of the sidewalks; horse cabs and an 
occasional military automobile creep through the uncertain 
walkers in thoroughfares whose every window and door is 
curtained with black or shuttered tight. Only in the resi- 
dential quarters is the blackness relieved by little proces- 
sions of winking stars — the pocket torches the householders 
use only to discover their own doors. The silence is really 
worse than the dark. A footstep is audible a block, a cry 
four or five blocks, the rumble of a heavy vehicle through- 
out a whole quarter. Any sudden or unusual noise electri- 
fies the town. It is the same story 'cross-Channel. The 
crawling mass that is the British capital writhes in and out 
upon itself, colliding, apologizing, slipping away in the 
dark without recognition. Eestaurants and hotels are rec- 
ognizable only by their bulk or architectural peculiarities. 
This darkness is harvest time for the unfortunate women 
of the half -world. By the thousand they infest every great 
avenue of all the large cities, French and English, lurk in 
every byway, invade every hotel and restaurant, and at- 
tempt even to penetrate the sacredness of the Eed Cross 
and semi-religious huts and canteens which minister to the 
fighting man. They are not the mere flotsam of unmoral- 
ity to be found in time of peace. They are the wrecks, thou- 
sands of them, that Germany's degenerate policies of war 
have cast up on the Allies' shores. Some of them, no doubt.. 



34 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

made war their excuse for what they would not have dared 
in peace time. But to many tragedy piled upon tragedy 
until, their normally scant store of morals gone, they 
chose "the easiest way." "The easiest way!" To see their 
wolfish faces, which no artistry with rabbit's foot and 
rouge stick can disguise, and their hungry, pleading eyes, 
Belgian, Polish, Galician, French, Russian, Serbian, Eng- 
lish, Irish, yes, and American even, is to look into the pit 
of that hell the Hun has loosed throughout the world, and 
whose victims are not 3 r et numbered. They are hungry, 
these poor creatures. So are the lonely babies many of 
them leave at home when they start to prowl the lightless 
streets — babies some of them the offspring of rape, some 
of a too-yielding love, some of careless girlish passion or 
recklessness. And one mere child I saw, one night in Pic- 
cadilly Circus, far gone in pregnancy, with an expression 
upon her haggard, painted face a Dante only could have 
put in words to wring the soul. 

Never, so long as I live, shall I be able to see the full 
moon again without thinking : "They'll be over to-night !" 
For over them all, Paris and London, seaport and inland 
city, hangs the sinister threat of the air raid whenever the 
night is bright. I have sat quietly through such a raid in 
a restaurant in the very railroad station the flying bodies 
were trying to hit — the waitresses kept smiling ; the cashier 
never looked up from Her accounts — and heard the frightful 
explosions of those two-hundred-and-twenty-pound bombs 



BEHIND THE FEOJSTT 35 

of high, explosive, the raving of the anti-aircraft guns, and 
the snappy crack of bursting shrapnel. I have heard the 
piercing alerte of the great siren upon a town fortress warn 
the population of the approach of the enemy, and the bugle 
call that announced the danger over. I have looked down 
into the demolished tangle of timbers and masonry that a 
few hours before was a house where nineteen men, women and 
children had taken refuge, and seen the debris lifted cau- 
tiously away in the hope that though the groaning had died 
out into a sickening silence, there might be a little life yet 
left to save. And I have talked with those heroic English 
women whose ambulances responded to that call while the 
bombs were still falling; women who could tell me without 
thought of anything but service, of standing by the work- 
ers, or penetrating the ruin itself regardless of their own 
danger, to alleviate the agony whose cries dropped away one 
after the other as the hours passed until finally there was 
no sound save the scraping of the beams and stones being 
lifted from their bodies. 

^rightfulness ? No — Failure! Wherever Germany has 
loosed the insane fiendishness of which she boasts, the re- 
sult has been the same. Murder has been done, hideous 
cruelties have been perpetrated, and whether the work be 
"in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the water 
under the earth," its effects have been most terrible upon 
the exponents of frightfulness themselves, robbing them of 
whatever soul they had left, and, now that the Allies have 



36 WITH THEEB AEMIES 

been forced to reprisals, bringing before them in letters of 
fire: "With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to 
yon again; pressed down, shaken together and running 
over. 



CHAPTER III 

THE ARMIES ON" THE WESTERN FRONT 

How is any one, psychologist or materialist, to describe 
the Allied Armies that are fighting Prussian militarism, 
and give the man who knows none of them a grasp of their 
fundamental differences of racial pride and feeling, and at 
the same time make perfectly obvious the cohesiveness of 
the common cause before which every difference is "sunk 
without trace," every personality and racial aspiration sub- 
ordinated ? 

We think and speak cheerfully of the "Allies" in the 
war. But why "Allies" ? Why are the Nations allied — what 
does it all mean ? How many of us have ever thought of it 
seriously, or done anything but smile when a helpless 
miniature republic like Costa Eica or Monaco, or an effete 
oriental monarchy like Siam, casts in its lot with its greater 
neighbors ? 

There is a meaning: be sure of that. Otherwise why 
should a score of Nations all around the earth band to- 
gether — white and black, yellow and brown, great and 
small, weak and powerful, rich and poor — to fight the 
Teutonic Powers? Ah, one man says wisely, the reasons 
are too clear to require any great thought. Here one nation 
entered the war for sheer self-preservation. Here one is in 

37 



38 .WITH THREE ARMIES 

it for the most selfish and sordid of reasons — acquisition 
of territory; this one for indemnity; another for revenge; 
still another to cnrry favor with the stronger Powers. On 
only one point is every one agreed: that we, the United 
States, are in the war for absolutely unselfish and altruistic 
purposes. As Americans, we could enter the war in no 
other spirit — yet, even we were under suspicion at first. 

To some extent the wiseacres' strictures may be founded 
on truth. Human nature is human nature, and very few 
motives are purely disinterested — even American motives ! 
But I also affirm that back of every other reason, under- 
lying all the minor motives, there exists a solid, common 
foundation — the innate decency of the majority of man- 
kind. This basic fact is so pure and untainted in its 
springs that it not only has held fast for three and a half 
years nations otherwise rivals, but is adding strength to 
their numbers as the fight goes on. 

Never before has there been an epoch-making war more 
a crusade and less a sordid conflict ; never a war, since the 
lays of the great migratory struggles, in which the issue was 
conquest and absorption or death ; never a war in which 
the opinion of the enlightened world was so solidly united, 
so determined to carry the fight to the bitter end whatever 
the cost. All that is what has made Allies of practically 
every Nation which has subscribed to the belief in civiliza- 
tion instead of barbarism, which has no wish to revert to 
primitive principles and the caveman law of force alone. 

Of all the Armies, the simplest to understand is the 



THE ARMIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT 39 

Belgian. Fighting in the first instance purely for honor, 
then for the preservation of life itself — not only the life of 
the Nation, but individual life — driven to the last desperate 
stand on the tiny remaining strip of free Belgium, it has 
sustained in every way the heroic traditions of its prede- 
cessors throughout the ages. 

For a good deal of this I believe King Albert I is respon- 
sible. The man who, as a Prince, tramped fifteen hundred 
miles through the jungles of the dark Congo to see for 
himself whether the alleged atrocities King Leopold had 
winked at were true, and who, as soon as he reached the 
throne did all he could to remedy the evils, has proved 
himself to be to the Belgians of the twentieth century what 
Joan of Arc was and is to the French. Exposing himself 
in the trenches, sparing no fatigue or danger, working as 
few monarchs ever have had to work, Albert of Belgium has 
been everywhere and done everything to hold his people 
together and make possible a continuance of the Belgian 
Nation and ideal. The national motto, "L'union fait la 
force' 3 never had a better exemplification than in the 
achievements of this quiet, unassuming monarch, who has 
united himself and his people and his Army in an indis- 
soluble bond, despite every difficulty and hindrance. The 
faces of the men light up when his name is mentioned, and 
I have heard them attempt to disguise their depth of feel- 
ing for him with rough but tenderly meant epithets that 
would translate — could they be Englished at all — into pro- 
fane appreciation of such a "bear of a King !" 



40 WITH THBEE AEMIES 

Perhaps the King alone could not have made the Belgian 
Army what it is in the circumstances : the Teuton propa- 
ganda has been insidious and persistent; the racial differ- 
ences and interests of Fleming and Walloon tend to make 
them think and see at cross purposes among themselves. 
But ever before their eyes has been the example of such 
heroic spirits as gallant Cardinal Mercier — as brave and 
determined a man as he is great a prelate — and that tem- 
peramental Mayor, fiery little Burgomaster Max. ISFo 
doubt, too, the solidity of character of the Belgians, that 
made them so successful in developing their country, helped 
to hold them together while it was being shot from under 
their feet. To-day the officers, from Generals to Sub- 
Lieutenants, all display sunniness of soul and sweetness 
of temper. How much of this is for the sake of impressing 
the foreigner, and more especially to cheer their men, no 
one can say. The men, less intelligent and naturally less 
informed, evince a sturdy, unemotional, placid assurance. 
I could interpret them only in one way, analyze their atti- 
tude only as saying with perfect clearness: "We have 
fought a mighty good fight. We are not trying to do the 
impossible now, but we will hold fast to what we have. 
And we know the future is safe !" 

Most complex of all is the British Army, that weird 
medley of Englishman and East Indian, Afrikander and 
Canadian, Highlander and Australian, Irishman, Welsh- 
man and New Zealander, and the Chinese laborers who 
form a military auxiliary of tremendous value. Weird as 



THE ARMIES ON THE WESTERN ERONT 41 

the conglomeration is> its psychology, taken altogether, is 
very simple : "frightfully bored, but going to stick it !" 

The best expression of this dogged attitude is perhaps 
the reply any officer will make when asked how long the 
war will last. "Oh" — a little wearied by such an idiotic 
question — '"the first fourteen years will be the worst ; after 
that, every other seven." 

There never has been any question in Tommy's mind 
about the result. "Hengland beaten — by a 'un ? Garn !" 

Tommy is not, on the average, either a very quick-witted 
or a very thoughtful person. When an officer is in charge 
of him, he takes the view that the officer is responsible for 
him, body, boots and baggage; so he mislays, drops, loses, 
forgets his equipment with a fine disregard for the next 
possibly tragic moment. Only when he is "on his own" is 
he careful. But under all circumstances he is perfectly and 
calmly sure of one thing: he will "stick it" if it takes a 
hundred years to decide the question definitely. 

Beaten, in retreat, badly used by his Government, not 
fully comprehending why he was fighting — all this in the 
frightful summer of 1914 — he still stood to his guns 
without a thought of giving in. Now, better equipped, bet- 
ter fed, better supplied than any other Army in the field 
in 1918, he is bored, horribly bored. Only in action does 
his boredom cease. Otherwise, he is "fed up" with the 
whole wretched business, but placidly determined to go 
right on, no matter how long it takes, as was that lorry 
driver in 1914 detailed to take a motor truck from Reims 



43 WITH. THEEE ARMIES 

to Amiens. He and his mate rumbled on their way as far 
as Rouen. "Blimey!" exclaimed the driver. "This 'ere 
eyen't the plice. "We've missed the barmy road." He made 
inquiries. A Frenchman indicated the proper route, but 
suggested that the two Tommies might find the bodies at 
Amiens. "Oii right, ole top/' responded Tommy, lighting 
a fresh "fag," "we'll mike the run orl the sime. If we sees 
any 'uns, we'll shoot 'em." 

Tommy's indifference to danger carries on quite as 
calmly when he is in the hottest of it as when he is fifty 
miles away. Never was this more Britannically displayed 
than on the September day (1917) when Fritz caught a 
party of Royal Fusiliers along the Broenbeek in his bar- 
rage. The men sheltered in a trench more a rubbish heap 
than a defense, and the German guns "laid down" a deadly 
torrent of steel and high explosive all about them, yet 
they sang cheerily the Army version of In These Hard 

Times — 

"You've got to put up with anything 
In these hard times!" 

TKey could not retreat, they could not advance. Living, 
dead, dying huddled together. The air was full of flying 
steel and acid fumes and debris and bits of men, while the 
solid earth shook to the explosions — and the song roared 
on with a joyous inconsequence : 

"Oh, if you live to be ninety-four, 
And carry on to the end of the war, 
You may get leave, but not before, 
In these hard times!" 



THE ARMIES ON THE WESTERN ERONT 43 

The men in the support trenches heard and took it up ; the 
enemy across the shell-blasted stretch of No Man's Land 
heard it, too, and must have marveled at those "crazy 
English/' All the while the Fusiliers, working with their 
dead and wounded, sang gallantly on, and the tawdry music- 
hall ballad took on an epic quality that spoke the soul of 
England — that great and modest soul no German can ever 
comprehend. 

The British soldier has never seemed to "know the use 
o ? fear." But until 1914 and after, he was insular to the 
last degree. India did not change him. Egypt burned him 
with its sun, but did not alter his thought. Political parties 
in England alternated, and new cabinets muddled about as 
always; yet still he remained firmly and incurably British 
in every heart-beat — and insular. To-day the old British 
spirit is still full and strong, but the insularity is largely 
gone. The soul of England has been purified and sweet- 
ened by the black draft, its corners rubbed smooth by 
attrition with her strenuous Colonials — high-spirited Ca- 
nadians full of the tang of the north woods, brawny 
Australians and New Zealanders with no room in their 
capable heads for pettiness of any sort, stout-hearted Afri- 
kanders who have scant patience with red tape and in- 
efficiency. One and all they were shocked by England — 
shocked her. When the first surprise wore away, they trod 
upon the maternal toes deliberately, brutally. They 
"spoofed" at everything they did not understand or ap- 
prove. They drove their English officers to profanity and 



44 WITH THREE ARMIES 

gray hair — and at last all came into the fellowship of a 
big, solid family. 

The Nation is awake; awake to the danger for civiliza- 
tion, awake to the fact that antiquated methods of thought 
as well as of action must vanish if England is to remain. 
The awakening has not been pleasant or easy, but it has 
been thorough and soul-stiffening. The result has been a 
gradually developing efficiency, national as well as indi- 
vidual ; an efficiency before which the machine efficiency of 
the Teuton fades into insignificance, and which carries a 
mighty lesson for us, who boast of our ability to accomplish 
wonders. Notwithstanding she had to invent, create and 
operate not only an Army but a System, and notwithstand- 
ing the breakdowns, delays and blunders she had to combat 
at first, England has for more than two years been able to 
maintain an Army of millions in a foreign country, carry- 
ing them to and fro across a stormy sea infested by perils, 
has done it without hitch or insupportable loss, and, withal, 
in a cheery, perfectly matter-of-fact way. Every day and 
night since 1914 her ships have swept across the Channel 
with the regularity of clockwork — yet no Englishman 
thinks of speaking of it as an achievement. 

Indeed, England's one surviving insularity still in full 
force is the English habit of such undue modesty that it is 
rather an unholy pride in itself ! The Briton will not talk 
of anything he has done, because to do so would be "swank/' 
or to "put on side" ; in Americanese, to blow. But he tries 
so hard to cover up his good deeds they often stand out all 



THE ARMIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT 45 

the clearer. In his heart he is deeply grateful and appre- 
ciative of the loyalty of his colonies ; hut he waves aside the 
heroic devotion of the Indian and the Afrikander, and 
affects to regard the splendid sacrifices of Canada and 
Australia and New Zealand as purely a matter of course 
and so not to be spoken of. "It's not done, you know — " 

What the Englishman does not do, the American ob- 
server may. I can pay tribute in full propriety to the 
magnificent qualities, and to the discipline that has mod- 
eled the new British Army on lines that made it not only 
the smoothest working, most cheerful, efficient and respon- 
sive Army of all those in the field in 1917, but also the 
most terrible weapon men ever forged and placed in the 
hands of any Government. It is at times amusingly — at 
others annoyingly — sure of itself; but it has behind it the 
indestructible cohesiveness of the vast Empire from which 
it comes. The sun that never sets on the Union Jack also 
never sets on Thomas Atkins, and somehow he seems to 
have drunk it in, imbibed its majestic qualities of serenity 
and force, and its ability to blast as well as to vivify and 
Hearten — even if he is bored ! 

And what of the poilu, that heroic individual whose mili- 
tary nickname has justly become the synonym for devo- 
tion, for singleness of purpose, for thoughtful patriotism 
which counts the cost and recks nothing so Erance be 
served? A fierce little Zouave named Moinard, found one 
bitter, snowy night alone in his sector of trench by his 
Captain, his companions all dead or badly wounded, spoke 



46 WITH THREE ARMIES 

for France when he cried cheerily : "EK, Men, mon Capi- 
taine — I'm all alone but here I am !" 

"Here I am!" At the Marne, in the months along the 
bloody Somme, at Verdun, along the crimsoned Chemin 
des Dames to-day, the Frenchman stands like one of his 
own Alps. Those of us who had known France and her 
children for years felt before this war that we understood 
the French mode of thought, the French spirit, as well as 
aliens can ever understand the thought and spirit of an- 
other race. How utterly wrong we all were ! We felt that 
here was a Nation whom super-refinement had tainted with 
the hectic flush of decline. Nobody seemed to be thor- 
oughly virile in the cities ; nobody in the provinces seemed 
to be gifted with vision beyond the petty affairs of the 
locality. The very soldiers looked effeminate. How could 
they stand stiffly in battle against a powerful foe ? 

Then fire and blood and hatred inundated the whole 
northern section of this loveliest land in Europe. And what 
happened? Ah, the soldiers of France! What have they 
not done ? What have they not endured ! — the bitter cold 
water of the flooded winter trenches ; the wounds ; the fury 
and horror of the battle-fields ; the slow agonies of the hos- 
pitals. . . . Heroically they have sacrificed themselves 
in a war without personality, without any of the ancient 
glories of warfare. 

The full story of the poilu's endurance and heroism can 
never be written. Think of the two artillery observers in a 
shattered house who watched while a German battery — ■ 



THE ARMIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT 47 

half destroyed by their reports to the guns — took a new 
position close to their post, and telephoned cheerily back: 
"They're in position now. Shoot at us! Name of God — 
shoot!" Mingled with this pure and lofty heroism runs a 
crusader-like chivalry no medieval knights ever bettered. 
A Corporal and his squad on patrol one night found an- 
other French petty officer hanging by his feet, horribly 
crushed and beaten. In a rage, the men swore a solemn 
oath to treat the first Germans who fell into their hands 
the same way. Not long after, they caught two ooches — ■ 
and because they were half starved, the poilus wept with 
rage at not being able to beat them to death. Instead, they 
gave them their own last crusts ! 

The losses France has suffered have been terrible, but 
they have not sufficed to crush her spirit. Last summer in 
some quarters, one manifestation of the vicious German 
propaganda it seems impossible to eradicate anywhere in 
the world, was an air of despondency, of wishing the war 
was over, of being willing to admit defeat and make the 
best terms possible. But with the arrival of the first Amer- 
icans in France to back her up, the grim resistance of the 
past year has become a joyous reaction; confidence reigns 
throughout the French Army as it has rarely reigned be- 
fore, and there is the delight of union with an Ally of the 
same gay, mercurial, sentimental temperament to savor 
every combat, and lead every man straining on to the day 
when the border shall be crossed. Even in the blackest 
hours the Frenchman kept right on going back to the front 



48 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

— even men already minus an arm or a leg or an eye. That 
they had to go back is perhaps true. No one who knows 
France, however, will believe for a moment the vast major- 
ity recognized that as the thing which drove them back into 
the fire and blood. 

It was, it is, it always will be Prance ! "France" is the 
magic name by which all are conjured, whether teaching a 
school, working in a factory, or fighting in the line. 
"France" has given Government, Army and people absolute 
unity of purpose, of thought, of action. The very Senega- 
lais negroes, themselves but a step removed from savagery, 
consider themselves Frenchmen! One of them grinned: 
"First war for me, Congo; second, Morocco; third, 'bodies. 
Three wars against the savages !" This French unity, 
however, is entirely different from the British unity, in 
which all the different elements of the Empire, though 
welded by the common cause, retain their separate individ- 
ualities. The French, whether home-born or colonial, 
whether nobleman or negro, possess only one soul, have 
only one life, recognize only one love— France I 

How shall an American analyze an American Army — 
the American Army — which isn't an Army yet in the Con- 
tinental sense? It is a vast agglomeration of Americans 
struggling to find themselves, striving as no other Amer- 
icans since the bitter days of the 'sixties have had to strive, 
to fit their Chinese puzzle together into an Army, to mold 
themselves into a unit, into a real weapon — to get them 
the Soul of an Army. What shall we have, and how. 



THE ARMIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT 49 

shall we get it? Shall we have that intangible some- 
thing of spirit that knits together our French neigh- 
bors in the line beyond any power to unravel! or will 
it be, when it comes, the blunt, unruffled solidity and 
cold businesslikeness of our British forebears and pres- 
ent Allies ? I believe it will be akin to both, and like nei- 
ther. As America differs from every other nation in spirit 
and conditions, so will her Army differ. 

American of ten generations of native blood and for- 
eigner newly naturalized are both vivified by that nervous 
agility of mind as well as of body that is the dominant 
characteristic of the race : the ability to think and act with 
speed, certainty and tremendous striking power. The 
natural gaiety and abandon of American youth, ardent 
lovers of sport and the fiercest of competition; the whole- 
some love of danger and taking chances that astonishes and 
perplexes some of our soberer-minded Allies; the lightness 
of mind that can instantly throw off burdens and anxieties 
when the day's work is done, and plunge headlong into 
recreation; the deadliness of American rage when at last 
thoroughly aroused, and the conviction that we can set a 
very wrong world completely right — these things should 
eventually mold into a truly "formidable American war 
machine." 

Everybody who has seen anything of the new Army, 
either here or in France or England, has received more or 
less the same impression. Lord Northcliffe, after visiting 
one of our huge camps here, called us "a good-natured but 



50 WITH THREE ARMIES 

drastic people," and a French correspondent, after spend- 
ing a week in one of the French camps where the American 
soldiers are being trained, wrote of the "terrible determina- 
tion and unbelievable ardor, the energetic attitude and 
furious, whole-souled execution of every detail of training, 
surprising even to those who are familiar with the Amer- 
ican tenacity of purpose." It may be remembered also that 
the London newspapers, after seeing the first detachments 
of our men who marched through their capital, had a little 
good-natured amusement over the grimness and tigerish 
attitude of even the youngest, remarking with a somewhat 
conscious air of superior experience that we would lose that 
very quickly and become as commonplace about the war as 
themselves. 

They did not know Sammy — begging his pardon for the 
name he didn't want, but which is sticking to him. The 
French correspondent already quoted caught a fairer vision 
of the American attitude. He saw that here were men not 
yet soldiers, but trying with all their hearts and souls to 
develop into the best soldiers the world has ever seen, or, 
as he put it : "Their habit of mind is different from ours. 
They do not use as their slogan 'On les aura' (We'll get 
them) or anything of that sort. . . . Their philosophy 
is: 'The better I am trained, the stronger I shall be, and 
the better able to preserve my own life and win the vic- 
tory.' " That is not the spirit of losing grimness, for every 
American soldier feels to the bottom of his heart that he 



THE AEMIES ON THE WESTEEN EEONT 51 

has been called, again in Monsieur Glarner's words, "not 
to participate in this war, but to end it." 

General Pershing, I think, has stated all this with elo- 
quent terseness in one of his cablegrams: "They have 
entered this war with the highest devotion to duty, and 
with no other idea than to perform these duties in the most 
efficient manner possible. They fully realize their obli- 
gation to their own people, their friends and the country/' 

It is not fair to compare the American Army as yet with 
the veteran Armies of France and England; but, develop- 
ing side by side with them, will it eventually fit into the 
same psychological category in which they may be placed ? 
Never — it is, it will continue to be, wholly and typically 
American. All the stream of immigration that for so 
many decades has been pouring all sorts of malcontents and 
good citizens, anarchists and patriots, inchoate captains of 
industry and worthless tramps into America has failed to 
wipe out that clear flame of national character, which, how- 
ever it may flicker for the moment in the political gales 
and the stress of misunderstood and new conditions, never 
for one instant ceases to burn. 

The American Army will find a Soul, an Army's Soul; 
but it will also be an American Soul, with all that history 
has shown that to mean to mankind. 

Now that the reason for being allied is clear, and the 
Allied Armies are neatly classified and pigeonholed, let us 



52 WITH THREE ARMIES 

consider what the task before them is, exactly what they 
must do to justify their existence. 

Only one thing ! They must prove to the German people 
■ — to the people, not to the Government alone — that Kultur 
is a failure. Not until that is done, and done right, will 
there be any safety for civilization, for Kultur is not cul- 
ture such as we know and value. It is not in any sense the 
social, mental, spiritual development of a free people. Kul- 
tur is the ruthless development, at the expense of the indi- 
vidual, of a heartless, soulless State, filled with puppets 
who move as their rulers by "divine right" pull the strings. 
The most amazing part of it is that the puppets move will- 
ingly — because they believe in the system themselves. 

There are only two ways by which we can prove to them 
that this system, this Kultur, is a failure, and a disastrous 
failure. The first way we are taking at the present mo- 
ment : sheer brute force. The Teuton respects force. He 
has had force used on him so long he understands it. The 
Allied Armies are fighting now to victory. It may take 
long to win, but the victory is certain. And by defeating 
Germany decisively, we shall make the German people see 
that there is something in the world stronger than their 
vaunted Kultur, their militarism. We shall show them, by 
beating them, that no single Nation or ruler can dominate 
mankind. 

The second way of convincing them of their failure is 
contingent upon the first. It will be done by opening their 
eyes, once the victory is won, to what true freedom and 



THE ARMIES ON" THE WESTERN" FRONT 53 

honor, liberty and decency do for a great people. We shall 
open their eyes to the facts we all know, to the facts we too 
seldom think about, simply because we know them so well. 
And "seeing is believing." They will do the rest them- 
selves. 



CHAPTER IV 

LES YANKEES AND THEIR SPECIAL PROVIDENCE^ 

Up in a big, smoky, wide-awake New England town not 
long ago, after a lecture that apparently gave the audience 
of business and professional men a new perception of what 
modern warfare means and is, I was asked a question that 
largely reflects the national curiosity. 

"Tell me," demanded my questioner earnestly, "what 
sort of an Army we are sending over to France. I mean, 
what sort of men compose it ? How do they behave ? Of 
course, I know what my own boy is — he's all right. But 
how about the other fellow ? Are most of the rest of them 
the same sort?" 

The gentleman who asked that question is a college 
graduate, a business man controlling a great manufacturing 
industry, a man who takes a vigorous part in the good 
works and clean politics movement of his city. Yet he had 
never given five minutes' intelligent consideration to the 
"sort of an Army" we are sending to France. 

"Look from your office window down upon the street any 
day at noon hour," I answered. "There is your American 
Army." 

What "sort of an Army," indeed! What "sort of an 

54 



LES YANKEES 55 

Army" could we send? Here is every nation under the 
sun, from white to black, from gutter blood to the purple 
ichor of the E. E. V/s and the Mayflowers, going, in typi- 
cal American spirit, "to take a chance," but going intelli- 
gently. The Georgia negro who said he was "willin' tuh 
go tuh fight dat-ar ole Kaisuh tuh mek ? im set free de 
slaves in Belgum" knew quite as well the American spirit 
he represented as the Harvard graduate who talked learn- 
edly of the inevitable evolution of democratic institutions, 
etc. Each and all, whether they have reasoned it out or not, 
sense the wrong and go, certain of victory and ready to 
pay for it. 

It is an Army, moreover, as Lloyd George pithily de- 
scribed it, of "volcanic energy." Something is immediately 
needed; the Army is told it can not be had — and lo, it 
appears ! Something has to be done ; the Army is told by 
experts it will take three months to get it done — and lo, 
the Army peels off its tunics, falls to, and the thing is ac- 
complished in fewer weeks than the experts estimated 
months ! Physically, it is practically a perfect body of men, 
literally the "flower of the country's youth." Weaklings 
have been carefully eliminated. We shall not be encum- 
bered at the outset, as were Belgium, Erance and Eng- 
land, by men who can not stand the hardships of campaign- 
ing, and who accordingly clog the hospitals and hinder 
vital operations. The Army also conspicuously contains 
imagination, good nature, intelligent willingness. If it 
swaggers a bit, and brags, and regards "foreigners" as a 



56 WITH THREE ARMIES 

"funny bunch o' boobs who have to be shown/' charge that 
to its lack of experience. 

In some things, alas, it is too experienced ! It uses lan- 
guage which is truly not the speech of any other folk 
under heaven. It is the most uselessly, habitually profane 
Army in the world; and it does not curse with discrimina- 
tion or finesse. Some swearing is a liberal course in the 
joy of living. American profanity, contrariwise, is a mere 
matter of a bad word between every two good ones. It 
is guilty, moreover, both officers and men, of looking 
"upon the wine when it is red," on occasion, and mak- 
ing a deal of good-natured noise about it where it at- 
tracts attention. I am quite aware of the denials re- 
cently made of this. But I speak of what I personally 
witnessed. General Pershing made only a relative state- 
ment of the Army's morals — "There never lias been a 
similar body of men to lead as clean lives cos our American 
soldiers in France" — and that statement is absolutely true ; 
but it should be read with the same intelligence as that 
with which it was written. At luncheon on the Grands 
Boulevards one noon I picked up conversation with a 
French officer who evidently thought me an Englishman. 
At a near-by table a party of Sammies grew noisier and 
noisier over their wine. "Via, ces Americainsl" gestured 
the officer. "All they do is drink, drink, drink, and roar, 
roar, roar !" Fortunately, Sammy's special providences are 
doing a good deal to lessen this objectionable feature. 

On the steamer going over I had been impressed by the 




Major-General Pershing and staff at a French aerodrome watching 
evolutions of the flying men 




All that is left of the chateau at Avrecourt — Somme 




The church of Villers-les-Roye 











Desolation 



LES YANKEES 57 

Y. M. C. A. only as a clean-cut and companionable crowd 
of healthy-minded young Americans full of the joy of 
living — and the desire to college-yell French'. Arriving 
late in the evening in Paris, when my hotel restaurant was 
closed, I started out to hunt dinner. Passing the most dis- 
reputable of the larger music-halls, I was amazed to see 
the Y. M. C. A. man to whom I had taken most fancy 
boldly entering it in full uniform. Dinner was forgotten 
in the scent of news. I followed him in, expecting that 
when he saw me he would try to sneak away, or lose him- 
self in the throng of cocottes, half-drunken civilians and 
soldiers and general ne'er-do-wells. Not a bit of it! He 
came straight toward me with outstretched hand. 

"What are you doing in here?" I demanded severely. 
"Is this the sort of thing the Y. M. C. A. sent you over 
to see?" 

He grinned at me with cheerful assurance. "Yep! 
What you doin' here? ? s no place for you, if what I've 
heard is true, and it looks like it," he finished, glancing 
around. 

I repeated my question, and he laughed at me. "Why, 
friend, I came in here to see what I have to fight ! How'm 
I goin' to talk right to the boys if I don't know what I'm 
talkiir* about? I reckon," he added, sidling over toward a 
helpless infantryman, "I got a case right now. So long, 
old man — don't stay too long!" He tackled the intoxicated 
American, untangled him from his two harpies and a 
pillar, dismissed the women so sharply they stayed dis- 



58 WITH THREE ARMIES 

missed, and led his first case heavily away into the night 
and safety. 

I had a new vision of the Y. M. C. A. from that night. 
Everywhere I went the story was the same. Temptation, 
disease, danger, death even, have no terrors for these sturdy 
American gentlemen in khaki. They may not all follow 
the same abrupt methods as my friend of the music-hall 
incident, but they do not scold, they do not preach idle 
words, they do not balk at anything. More than all, they 
have the human view-point, and instead of conventional 
religion which seldom really gets under a man's pelt, they 
give him service, sympathy, hard work; they make him 
realize that when he wants anything, whether a sheet of 
letter-paper or a spiritual bracer, a cup of hot coffee or a 
pleasant evening's entertainment, they are instantly ready 
to supply it. They always know what they are talking 
about, and they measure what they can do only by the limit 
of their powers. 

The Salvation Army, because of its methods, helps a type 
of man the Y. M. C. A. might not always be able to deal 
with successfully. It reaches out into the dark on the re- 
ligious side with tremendous effect, as in the case of the 
young soldier it saved a week or two before he was left on 
the field when the charge had passed. "Done for !" sighed 
the officer searching for wounded. The lad opened his eyes 
and smiled feebly. "No!" he whispered with his last 
breath. "Gone west — but not done for !" 

The Catholic society, the Knights of Columbus, has 



LES YAH&EES 59 

joined hands with the other organizations, and is working 
with them in complete harmony and sympathy. Indeed, 
one of the most hopeful signs of the day for Christianity 
is the entire subordination of anything like denomina- 
tionalism in the merciful work of all these bodies. The 
initials K. C. at first puzzled many of the soldiers. One 
British Tommy pondered the matter long and soberly, then 
demanded of an American friend — would that Bairns- 
father could have sketched him asking it! — "Siy, mite, 
wot th ? 'ell yuh got a King's Counsel in Samerica for?" 

The Jewish society, which confines its activities largely 
to the men of Hebraic extraction and interests, is doing a 
very important and valuable work that no other body could 
perform so well. The greatest amount of the religious work 
is, of course, being handled by the chaplains, who are 
directly charged with the spiritual welfare of their com- 
rades. But if the chaplain's work ended there, it would be 
insignificant indeed compared to what he is actually ac- 
complishing. Less gentle than all these, but exceedingly 
persuasive in their methods, are the M. P.'s, the American 
Military Police. These husky individuals, chosen for their 
character, sobriety and size, patrol in pairs wherever the 
soldiers congregate. Wearing an armband that proclaims 
their office, and armed with a short nightstick reinforced 
by the heavy Army automatic pistol for emergencies, they 
are doing excellent work of the most thankless sort. 

Of course, the Bed Cross, being by far the largest and 
most noted of all the American organizations that go with 



60 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

the Army, is the most universally recognized. And where 
would Europe be to-day without it? What would have hap- 
pened in a thousand cases where relief was needed instantly, 
without red tape or deliberation, when human lives in great 
numbers hung in the balance, waiting for the help that only 
quick decision and the speediest action could bring ? 

One of the finest things we have done in France was the 
housing of the Eed Cross supplies, vast stocks of which were 
piling up on wharf and street exposed to the weather, since 
no building big enough to shelter them was available. 
Some quick scouting was done, and the stables of one of 
the old Paris cab companies were discovered. The Erench 
shook their heads. "They won't do, gentlemen. They are 
unsanitary, they are full of manure, they have no facilities 
of any kind. It will take at least three months to put them 
into shape. Meantime your supplies will be spoiled." 

The Eed Crossers examined the filthy old stables, talked 
a little — and less than three weeks later the supplies began 
moving into a monstrous, clean, cement-floored warehouse 
which smelled sweet and which was sweet. The French 
gasped — "Impossible!" It was. But American uncommon 
sense knew any market-gardener would gladly cart away 
manure without charge. Then the Eed Crossers got off 
their coats, cleaned house, mixed cement and laid floors, 
built runways, turned carpenter for the nonce, and behold, 
there was a vast, dry, modern storehouse. "Volcanic en- 
ergy," indeed ! 

The most serious moral problem our Army has to facQ 



LES YANKEES 61 

affects not only the man at the front, but America itself; 
and it is one almost impossible of comprehension to those 
who have not been across within the last year or so. For 
a number of years there has been a steady and gratifying 
increase in the general morality of this country. Vice has 
been suppressed to such, an extent throughout many wide 
regions that the general moral tone of the community has 
been distinctly raised. Europe as a whole is more immoral, 
and more openly, shamelessly immoral now than ever 
before. The task of the Army chiefs is therefore infinitely 
more difficult than if conditions approached normal. The 
temptations which surround the soldiers are so tempting, 
the nervous strain to which they are being subjected so 
great, the social conditions so strange and abnormal to 
them, the persistence of the vicious element so unflagging, 
that the sturdiest nature is bound to be affected. 

The matter of venereal disease is only a part, and not a 
vital part, of the situation. The Army medical staff is car- 
ing for that, and no soldier will be returned to this country 
who is not first completely cured of any taint. Par worse 
than the physical is the moral contamination. That no 
authority can prevent. But the signs are hopeful. America 
is waking up, and General Pershing has his greatest ally 
in the mothers of the United States. Prom Maine to Cali- 
fornia they are realizing that this is their problem ; they are 
trying to reach the boys here, to follow them with the let- 
ters that "keep the home fires burning" in every soldier 
heart. But, Mothers of America, to safeguard the boys 



62 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

for whom yon have suffered and cared, don't preacJi — don't 
scold — don't nag! YERBOTEN signs will never hold an 
American ! But you can make your boys feel their honor, 
their custody of your honor, of America's honor perhaps 
most of all. And do not stop there. The girls are an 
equally important task. Fill each and every one of them 
with the sense of her responsibility to herself, to society, 
to America. Give them the picture of wifehood and moth- 
erhood as a background. Make them see that thoughtless 
immolation upon the altar of any selfish hero is not only 
all wasted and ruinous, but damning to the hero himself. 
I>o it lovingly, as well as thoroughly, so that when the 
boys come cheerily marching home again, into an at- 
mosphere of adulation close to worship, they will find 
neither temptation nor sentimental weakness, but starry- 
eyed, fearless women fit to be mates for them who have 
risked their lives for honor's sake. And meantime, while, 
in the land of strife, your boys are beyond your reach save 
for the infrequent mails, be comforted, Mothers, by the 
knowledge that Sammy's very special providences, like 
scouts flung out far afield, are keeping alive and powerful 
your own mother-spirit of guardianship and love — the 
spirit that is to keep the Army clean and wholesome and 
fit to return home. 

Already Messieurs les Sammees Have made a deeper dent 
in the French consciousness than five generations of Amer- 
ican tourists and diplomatic visitors. I think France ex- 
pected an inundation of something half-way between a 



LES YANKEES 63 

Comanche Indian and a London Johnny, if such a com- 
bination could possibly be. "What she actually received 
astonished, perplexed, delighted, amused and thrilled her. 
The black-eyed girls who threw flowers in the path of the 
tramping thousands wept unashamed. The children, who 
looked at these khaki giants at first shyly and then with 
awe, quickly ensconced themselves in the hearts of the men, 
and in return were promptly spoiled as only Americans 
can spoil children. 

Sammy's first meetings with the avaricious cabmen were 
not so happy, though amusing to the bystander. Usually 
when the police arrived they found the cabmen nursing a 
bloody nose or a cauliflower ear, and wondering what in 
the name of a little tin can had happened ! In the towns 
near which the men are training, a more unfortunate and 
quite as easily accounted for phase of temperament mani- 
fested itself. A soldier would go into a debit de tabac or 
tiny tobacco-shop, and secure a ten-cent package of ciga- 
rettes, tender five or ten francs in payment, and when 
change — exceedingly scarce now in France — could not be 
made, instead of going somewhere else for it himself, would 
mumble something and leave the note, going off with his 
cigarettes, not exactly happy, but not unhappy, either. An 
hour later a poilu, tossing down the customary half-franc 
for the same cigarettes, would be met with the polite state- 
ment that the price had gone up. Result: Madame loses 
the sale, poilu is furious at her, and then, when he dis- 
covers it is the American who has unconsciously elevate<J 



64 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

the high cost of smoking, freezes up in a way bewildered 
Sammy can not understand. 

This reputation for being a "good spender" has extended 
all over France, and in Paris especially, the Grands Boule- 
vards love Sammee dearly, even if he is inclined to be. 
rather difficult at times, and insistent upon having exactly 
what he orders and not something said to be "the same 
thing" or "just as good." Every French girl manages to 
make friends with a big, brown, open-handed American, 
the trees along the Italiens and Capucines and beside the 
Madeleine sheltering low-voiced conversations and sign- 
language understandings. For Sammee plays vigorously as 
he works, and he is chronically "from Missouri," whether 
it be in learning to flirt or to bomb a trench. He takes to 
grenade-throwing and bombing with all the aptitude of a 
natural baseball player, grasping the difference in the 
throwing method more quickly than any other troops. He 
makes a game out of bayonet drill with the dummies, and 
digs trenches as blithely as he goes into the big Chamber 
of Horrors for the gas-drills. Whatever he touches Is elec- 
trified; his teachers have to keep on the run to hold his 
pace ! 

The instructor at one of the largest aerodromes in 
France, where some of our naval flyers are being trained, 
has grown worn and gray under the trials they have un- 
consciously imposed upon him. The young sailors are not 
only absolutely fearless, but they insist on joking with 
death in its most sudden and violent forms. Not long ago, 



LES YANKEES 65 

when one of these young daredevils went up for his "solo," 
or initial flight alone, he stalled his engine while still 
climbing. The machine slowed, stopped, wavered — began 
those horrible zigzags known as the "falling leaf drop." 
The distracted instructor cried out: "OK, mon Dieu — il 
est mort! II est mort! Oh, my God, he's killed, he's 
killed!" 

The youngsters in the field laughed at him, and one 
young wretch replied to the face of horror he turned upon 
such brazen callousness : "Don't you worry, rrmssoor. He'll 
land 0. K. See if he don't !" 

At that moment the novice got his engine restarted, 
tilted his planes too far, and came roaring down straight 
toward the earth in a nose-dive that looked absolutely 
fatal. Still the boys laughed at his wild gyrations. The 
Frenchmen could not, and waited silently for the frightful 
crash. It never came. A few feet above the ground, the 
nervy flyer gave his planes a violent twist, hoisted his 
machine almost vertically with a jerk, and finally landed 
without a bump. He was distinctly peevish at being scolded 
for the risks he had taken. 

Another man, mistaking the course of the wind, came 
down with it blowing across his machine from side to side, 
and was drifted into an orchard, where he crashed among 
the apple trees. Every one ran when the smash was heard, 
and the Frenchmen, from instructor to mechanics, ex- 
pected to find him crushed. When they reached the spot, 
he was sitting calmly on the ground, eating one of the 



66 WITH THREE ARMIES 

apples shorn off by the fall that had torn loose his wings, 
and gently dropped his unhurt fuselage between the trunks. 
Unlike their French and British brethren, the Americans 
are talkative about their exploits, and there is freshness 
and charm to their stories, even when the tales are so obvi- 
ously exaggerated as to be made of the whole cloth. Sammy 
exercises his imagination, and knows it is so good he enjoys 
listening to it himself. 

The man who commands this splendid Army is Major- 
General John J. Pershing. Every one in America speaks 
of Pershing, and very few know anything about him. To 
those who know the man as well as the soldier, his selection 
for the greatest military post America has ever been able 
to give any man seemed most happy and fortunate. Fifteen 
years ago it was the writer's good fortune in the- distant 
Philippines to meet and know Captain Pershing, to whom 
fell the soul-testing task of governing unruly Moroland. 
Other professional soldiers had been there before him and 
left no record of importance. Captain Pershing made the 
Moro understand once and for all that an American "Yes !" 
meant yes, and an American "No !" meant no. A strict 
disciplinarian, but just and cool-headed, he has shown him- 
self able to digest facts before forming a working opinion; 
and, more than that, when once his opinion is formed, re- 
fusing to be swayed by every wind of chance. 

Fortunately for the world, he has the respect and con- 
fidence of the chiefs of the other Allied Nations and Ar- 



LES YANKEES 67 

mies and the devotion of his own officers and men. The 
soldierly qualities that enabled him to accomplish so much 
in the Philippines are enabling him to-day to keep every- 
body in the American Army in France literally on the 
jump, working as hard as he himself works, performing 
miracles in the only way they can be performed, through 
that very Biblical combination of complete faith and works. 
Without any of the erratic and uncertain qualities of ge- 
nius, General Pershing has that other quality of it, the 
"capacity for taking infinite pains," that augurs much for 
his ability to carry his big, happy, wholesome, schoolboy- 
spirited Army to the victory that only a big ideal and a big 
man can make possible. 



CHAPTER Y 

THE BRITISH IN FRANCE* AN HISTORICAL CONTRAST 

To the student of history there is unusual significance 
and interest in the presence of armed but friendly British 
forces in France; of significance because it marks a vital 
realization of the dream of the late King Edward VII, of 
gracious memory, who strove for a closer intercourse be- 
tween the two Nations, and of interest because it is a com- 
plete reversal of the one-time common policy of self-interest 
that so long held them at swords' points. For France and 
England not only have not always been Allies, but much 
more often have fought each other bitterly, once, in the 
so-called Hundred Years' War, for more than a century. 

All through northern France there are monuments and 
memories of the battle flux, when victory rested sometimes 
with one side, sometimes with the other: the tablet at 
Abbeville to heroic Ringois, who preferred death over a 
cliff to renouncing his king and country — France ; the slab 
over the spot in the old market-place of Rouen, where the 
English burned the shining maid, Jeanne d'Arc; the ruin 
of Richard the Lion-Heart's Chateau Gaillard — where 
Philippe Auguste made good his threat of capture — still 
crowning the hilltop of P'tit Andely and an exquisite 
vision of the Seine; the inexpugnable abbey-fortress of 

68 



THE BRITISH IN FEANCE 69 

Mont St. Michel, striving heavenward from the water in 
pile upon pile to its piercing spire and saint ; most vital of 
all, the Bayeux tapestry, that strip of seamless linen whose 
faded needlework tells graphically the stirring tale of the 
French raid forever famous as the Norman Conquest of 
1066, with as universal a humanity and appeal as though 
it were a series of snapshots for a twentieth-century sensa- 
tional newspaper. 

The present pacific Anglo-Saxon Conquest of France 
completely reverses the Norman Conquest of England. 
Almost a thousand years separate them in time; the whole 
range of human purpose and principle, in activity. The 
English of 1066 fought hard and surrendered grudgingly; 
the French of 1914 welcomed their whilom enemies with 
cries of joy. And instead of conquering as their sires had 
once "been conquered, the "First Hundred Thousand" of 
Kitcheners "contemptible little army" and its millions of 
gallant successors, though they bore arms of more frightful 
potentialities than 1066 ever dreamed of, won their way 
by the richest gifts ever one people gave another — limitless 
gold, boundless good will, unnumbered human sacrifices. 

Xenophon and Caesar were their own war correspondents, 
and saw to it that the homefolks got suitable news. One 
wonders, in the light of modern warfare, with its spies and 
its censors, its correspondents and political visitors wan- 
dering about the different fronts, how "The Eetreat of the 
Ten Thousand" and "De Bello Gallico" would have been 



?0 WITH THESE ARMIES 

told had a layman or a political opponent of the command- 
ing general been able to write and smuggle the manuscript 
past the censorship ! General Byng's laconic account of his 
famous tank advance was a mere skeleton, for instance, 
compared with the news account of the same thing, with 
its ringing anecdote of the commander who "expected 
every tank to do its damnedest !" 

Before entering the British lines, I gave my word I 
would not reveal certain things. Then, by a curious pair 
of mistakes, I blundered squarely into a forbidden zone, 
was put in the way of becoming dangerous to myself as a 
repository of military information really of value, and by 
another blunder got safely away with no other evil result 
than a heart which sometimes even yet nutters when I think 
of the connection so frequently established between alleged 
spies and stone walls ! Like the small boy who has accident- 
ally discovered the Christmas presents on the top shelf of 
the closet, I have seen a most amazing number of interest- 
ing things, and fairly burst with eagerness to tell. But the 
most interesting may not even be hinted at. Only "Xeno- 
phon" or "Cassar" will ever hint at them, in the "Official 
Communique" which — to those who know — is aggravation 
personified. 

The British line of communications leading to the front 
begins on the English Channel coast, darts across the 
stormy strait in a lane guarded and swept and watched 
by fleet destroj^ers and cruisers, trawlers and minesweepers, 
and, on reaching the French coast, sweeps north and east 



THE BRITISH IN FRANCE 71 

through Belgium and France to the bloody swales around 
Nieuport and blasted "Wipers" (Ypres), Arras and the 
other focal points in that general region. It is historic 
soil to the English. Their troops to-day pass not far from 
Crecy-en-Ponthieu, where, in 1346, the British longbows 
slaughtered more Frenchmen than there had been live 
Britons when the fight began. Froissart relates that the 
fourteenth-century British "clothyard" shafts swirled down 
upon the heavily armored French knights like a snow- 
storm, and threw them and their mired chargers into writh- 
ing confusion in the sticky mud. He might almost have 
been writing of a twentieth-century shrapnel barrage, whose 
tufts of smoke, blown by the breeze, would pass very well 
for just such a deadly snowstorm. 

To pass over the main line of the British communica- 
tions is to have a slight appreciation of what the machinery 
of modern war means behind the lines. Without it the man 
in the fighting trench could not keep his post a day. Never 
for an instant must this machinery be dislocated — or some 
gun will go without its meed of shells, some dressing sta- 
tion without the vital chloroform or bandages, some con- 
tingent without its food or supplies. Guns and men and 
animals mount up into the dozen or more millions. That 
means nothing: nobody knows what a million of anything 
is like. But watch an ammunition convoy, and begin to 
understand. Every gun of five-inch caliber or greater re- 
quires twenty-five five-ton motor truekloads of shells every 
day to keep in continuous action. Put a hundred yards' 



72 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

space between each car and its successor, and the convoy 
trails along for a mile and a half. That feeds one gun one 
day. In the "big push" undertaken every so often, the guns 
sometimes stand almost wheel to wheel for the whole width 
of the attack. The task of feeding them is titanic; bring- 
ing up shells is only one item among thousands. 

It is a sweating, toiling, patient river, this main road, 
whose stream of everything men at war can need has flowed 
steadily for more than three years in an ever-increasing 
flood. The congestion at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second 
Street, New York, is its only possible comparison, and that 
is hopelessly inadequate. And notwithstanding the un- 
numbered troops and auxiliaries, the guns big and little, 
the horse-drawn caissons and limbers, the dog-drawn ma- 
chine-guns of the Belgians — both Armies use this road, 
which further complicates traffic and temper alike — the 
snorting steam road-rollers and the inevitable French and 
Belgian farm wagons, which never get out of the way when 
they can help it, Tommy Atkins calmly preempts half the 
battered road, tears it to pieces and then proceeds without 
haste or waste to remake it. Staff officers fly by at sixty 
miles an hour and drench him with showers of mud or 
choke him with cutting chalk-dust. He wipes his eyes 
clear, swears vigorously, and falls to again. A regimental- 
train rumbles heavily along and holds up his work for five, 
perhaps ten, minutes. Thomas leans on his shovel or pick 
or corn-broom, lights his pipe and ponders like the phi- 
losopher he is. 



THE BRITISH IN FRANCE 73 

Color is added to the kaleidoscope by the canal alongside, 
where dainty-looking little French monitors with one very 
persuasive naval gun glide noiselessly by under their own 
steam — craft that would float in a heavy dew, but able to 
back up the land troops with their havoc-making diapason. 
Great French canal-boats almost awash with precious loads 
of coal, timber, food and all the paraphernalia of the war 
of to-day, trail along at a snail's pace in tow of trim- 
looking tugs. British canal-boats, too, cleaner of line than 
their Gallic companions, built of steel every one and popu- 
lated by Tommies in khaki, snail past with a sergeant at 
the wheel, smoking his pipe and appearing vastly com- 
fortable in his unusual surroundings — "a bloomin' bargee, 
? im^-wot?" Here and there a tremendous British chain- 
dredge idles by the bank, waiting a call to deepen or widen 
the shallow flood, or a flock of stripped-down Tommies 
repairs a wooden barge, builds a new hospital-boat, or erects 
something of temporary value on the farther bank. 

Fritz has the range of that section of the road nearest 
the front to a hair. Most often he shells it by night, evi- 
dently with the intention of interfering with the movement 
of supplies and the transfer of wounded — and always, 
when skimming over it at breakneck speed after dusk, one 
has an uneasy consciousness of that lurking monster gun 
that throws a shell nearly five feet long and ten or twelve 
inches thick a distance of thirty-eight kilometers — a mere 
trifle of something more than twenty-five miles ! 

Shooting at a twenty-five-mile range ! Imagine Edward 



74 WITH THREE ARMIES 

Ill's bowmen returned, to see their fellows brought down 
by a missile they could hear but not see coming, fired 
from a gun as far away from them as Boulogne is from 
Folkstone ! The wars of the fourteenth century were won 
by the personal vision and skill of the commander ; so were 
wars as recently as Napoleon's time. But to-day science is 
the brain and very life-blood of warfare. The quarter- 
master keeps the troops supplied and happy because of the 
exact, scientific disposition and action of every atom in his 
vast department. The lorries have their instructions as to 
what turnings they must make, and how fast they may go, 
even what they may and may not do if they run into shell- 
fire, and a man at the tailboard who notifies the chauffeur 
to turn out if a fast vehicle wishes to pass. The geologist 
dabs colors on a map which tells the ordnance and intelli- 
gence officers — the latter nicknamed "Brains" because he 
knows everything! — "Here you may mine, and here you 
must not; here it is safe to dig trenches; yonder any ex- 
cavation will instantly fill up with water or cave in." The 
very weather-man, once so hooted at, plays a vital role. 
Napoleon's gunners paid no attention to changes of tem- 
perature because they served their pieces in full view of 
the enemy. To-day the artillerist, registering with perfect 
accuracy upon a target anywhere from one mile to twenty 
miles distant, must change the elevation of his guns with 
each change of temperature sent him by the weather bureau 
— or drop his shells upon his own troops. Not one thing is 
left to chance or personal skill. 



^llililSfiililili 



■ 'MS 




%% 



''<** 






: 




U3 



THE BRITISH IN FRANCE 75 

The feeling of hostility between France and England 
was not seriously modified until the Victorian Era. France 
by that time had had opportunity to realize the falseness 
of the Napoleonic ambitions and the value of a solid foun- 
dation for her empire, and England, under the tempering 
influence of Queen Victoria and her advisers, was looking 
out upon mankind in general with eyes whose vision had 
been clarified by her experience of 1776. Since the begin- 
ning of the friendly relations of the two nations, the cities 
where the English once struggled to maintain a foothold 
solid enough to enable the King of England to add to his 
titles "of France" have developed wonderfully, especially 
the Channel ports most directly in touch with their British 
opposites. Boulogne, for instance, grew a thriving English 
trade and colony, with one citizen in every fifty a Briton 
Tn 1906 — this within a century of the time when, on the 
chalk cliffs behind, Napoleon gathered the vastest army of 
his time, two hundred thousand strong — think of that as 
a "vast" army! — to invade England, began his huge me- 
morial column, and rather prematurely struck off coins to 
pay his troops, each piece boldly inscribed "coined in Lon- 
don," or something to that effect ! 

Of these ancient seaports, the one nearest the front, still 
full of helpless women and children, and plastered over 
with signs instructing the inhabitants where to shelter in 
case of bombardment or air raids, sleeps but fitfully. 
Heavy British guns roar nightly responses to the German 
artillery's raucous bellowing. Houses and public buildings 



76 WITH THREE ARMIES 

are pock-marked with shrapnel, partly blown to bits by the 
explosions of aerial torpedoes and bombs, and racked every 
so often by the huge shells that drop in to keep garrison 
and population on their toes. Half a mile nearer the Ger- 
man lines, in a dreamy little plage or coast resort, the 
"movie" Casino lost a door and most of its end one day last 
summer as the result of an H. E. (the abbreviation of 
"high explosive") bomb. A few rough boards were nailed 
over the wound, and when I was there the crowd tiled in 
just the same to see the latest film, with calm disregard of 
possible danger. 

A little farther away one can sleep o ? nights, though the 
rumble of the heavy guns is always evident, and the marks 
of terrific maltreatment are visible everywhere. One can 
dine well here, too — with the entree to an officers' mess or 
the restaurants operated now largely for the benefit of the 
khaki-clad invaders. What the civilians eat I do not pre- 
tend to know, though the markets seem well stocked, and 
the butcher-shops replete with the horrid-looking skinned 
carcasses customary in France, repulsively suggestive of 
anatomical charts in color. It takes an effort to eat even a 
rabbit after seeing what he looks like under that soft and 
pretty pelt ! 

The "Golden Sands" of the Picard coast that link the 
famous medieval towns together like gray shells upon a shin- 
ing silken cord, have known the English — swarms of them 
— as tourists, "summer people" and semi-invalids. How 



THE BRITISH IN TRANCE 77 

different the English the "Golden Sands" welcome now. 
Here were pretty children, as in other days, but very few and 
very quiet now, even in their play; here were parents and 
friends and families as in those peaceful years, but all with 
the undertone of shadow in their once clear English eyes; 
here were pretty English girls, but instead of wearing 
bathing-suits, they were garbed in the sober dignity of 
nurses. But the young men, the smiling and gallant young 
Englishmen who used to overflow sands and links and tea- 
rooms — ! They lay in cots, they reclined in wheel-chairs, 
they sat on the grass, they pottered feebly about on sticks 
— or they lie forever dreaming in the little, square, white- 
fenced acres where only unpainted wooden crosses tell the 
story, and the gay, friendly dance of the French poppies 
above their fast-closed eyes .keeps aflame the torch their 
hands have passed on to their comrades. 

It was a brilliant afternoon last September, when the 
dancing sapphire of the Channel was blurred here and 
there by hazy blobs of gray ships in the distance, when 
officers with golf bags over their shoulders played uncon- 
cernedly over the hilly cliff links, and convalescent Tom- 
mies walked out with Erench and English maidens along 
the chalky roads, on which German prisoners toiled lei- 
surely under the sharp eyes of British sentries, that I came 
upon the great hospital and cemetery section. Previous 
English invasions have planted hundreds of their dead in 
the fertile soil of France; but now — J In America we 



78 WITH THREE ARMIES 

know in a vague sort of way that men are killed in such a 
war as this; but to come suddenly upon a concrete display 
of this abstract fact brings the truth home with a shock. 

Here, the heroic dead; yonder, working leisurely, the 
healthy, sturdy, contented prisoners, evidencing in every 
possible way, patched and ragged though they were, their 
satisfaction at being out of the hell they had created. Their 
air of insolent superiority to the men who had captured 
them was maddening. I wondered that the British could 
treat them like men. The irony of life jarred heavily. 
They, who boasted f rightfulness, lived; these others, who 
fought for everything right and decent and chivalric, won 
the supreme decoration of war — the wooden cross. 

British and French are wise, nevertheless, in the treat- 
ment they give the prisoners. It is totally undeserved, it 
is exceedingly costly, and it requires a large number of 
soldiers as guards; yet it is a policy that will perhaps go 
further in civilizing the German than any political measure 
or trade restriction that can be taken when the actual fight- 
ing is done. It is an education for these men, who from 
boyhood have been taught to despise the French and hate 
the English. The treatment they are accorded as prisoners 
is compelling them to see that the Englishman is not born 
with hoofs and a tail, that the Frenchman is no swagger- 
ing blow-hard unable to make good his word. And when 
they go back to a beaten Germany, however they may 
mourn the downfall of their politicians and warriors, they 
will know also how they have been systematically lied to 



THE BRITISH IN FRANCE 79 

and brutalized by wilful misstatements of everything — even 
of Germany's own needs and aims. France and England 
by their generosity and political sagacity are planting fer- 
tile seeds far deeper in the German heart than any blunder- 
ing German wiseacre of efficiency and Kultur knows. 

Another of these gray old Picard ports is completely 
transformed. The best hotel is the H. Q. of the B. R. C, 
or in plain American, the headquarters of the British Red 
Cross; all the other hotels are chock-ablock with British 
khaki; and truculent English M. P.'s, or Military Police, 
regulate the dense traffic as smartly and coolly as London 
Bobbies, at the same time keeping a watchful eye on the 
soldiery forever passing among the throngs on the almost 
impassable streets. 

The harbor, hardly more than a slim estuary, through 
which the ebullient tides rush at racehorse speed, is con- 
gested beyond belief with what looks to the landsman's un- 
educated eye like a hopeless tangle of fishing smacks and 
war craft, passenger liners, troopships, cargo-boats and 
others, all in bedraggled gray war paint, and all disgorging 
or engulfing unimaginable quantities of men and supplies. 
Every wharf is a mountain of boxes, crates, barrels, pack- 
ages of every sort, bearing the Broad Arrow of His Majesty's 
Service. Day and night the loading and unloading goes on 
at high pressure, almost without a break. Where and how is 
all this vast materiel transported ? It is always there, it is 
coming in and going out every day in a stream of incom- 
parable magnitude, yet it never overflows. The long quays 



80 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

can hold, at the utmost, perhaps two days' cargoes. British 
thoroughness and scientific management is taking care of 
It all in a silent, unemotional, perfectly methodical pro- 
cedure devoid of either haste or lost motion, that gets it up 
to the front or back to England without perceptibly un- 
hinging the usual business of the community. 

By night the town tucks its war-weary head under its 
wing and tries to hide in silent darkness from the prowling 
enemy in the air. But by day its medieval streets are as 
jammed as lower Broadway, its shop-windows a curiosity, 
full of foreign, mostly American goods. English signs are 
everywhere. Often the most patently American articles are 
boldly announced as "British' Made" to tempt the wary 
buyer who nowadays asks where a thing is manufactured. 
Almost every State, from Maine to California, is repre- 
sented by everything imaginable, from a huge machine to 
chewing-gum, from whisky to the weekly with the largest 
circulation, all jumbled together in an endless hodge-podge 
along the Grande Eue and its tributary side streets. The 
climax of Americanism, when I was there, was reached in 
a black-and-white sign, fifty feet long by ten feet high, 
spread across the facade of a "Cinema" theater — 
CHARLES CHAPLIN TO-DAY. Four years ago the 
staid old city would have gagged over such an irregularity ; 
now it piles Pelion on Ossa and clamors for more ! 

Every one of these cities is a rumor-factory, and once in 
a while, if one has the stomach to laugh at horrors, the 
daily fable brings forth something so utterly impossible it 




(Texte francais) 



Tous lea habitants de la maison, a Texception des eofants au-dessotis de 14 ans el de leiirs 
meres, ainsi qu'a i'excepiion des vieillards, doivent se preparer pour eJre transports dans une 
lueure el demie. 

Un oflGcier deciders definiUvement quelles nersonnes seront conduites dana les camps de 
reunion. Dans ce but. tous les habitants de la maison doiveni se reunir devaul leur habitation : en 
eas de mauvais temps, i) est permis de rester dans* le couloir- La porte de la maison devra rester 
owrerte. Toule reclamation sera inutile. Aucun habitant de la maison, meme eeux qui ne seront 
pas. transported ne pourra quitter la maison avant 8 beures du matin (heure altemande> 

Chaque personne aura droit a 30 kilogrammes de bagages; s'il y aura un excellent de poids, 
tous ies bagages de celle personne seront refuses sans egards. Les colis devront fitre faits 
separlinent pour chaque personne et mums d'une adresse lisiblement Ccrite el solidemenl fixee, 
L'adresse devra porter Is now* le prenoiu- et le numero de la carte d identita 

Q est tout a fail necessairb .do se munir dans son propre interet d'ustensiles pour botre et 
manger, ainsi que d'une couverture de laine, de bonnes chaussures el de tinge. Chaque personne 
devra porter sur .elle sa cart? d'idenlile. Quiconque essaiera de se souslraire an transport sera 
impitoyablement puni. 

ETAPPEN-KOMMANDANTUB. 

Ulte. Avrtt 1916. 



K 



NOTICE 

'(French Text) 1 

All the inhabitants of the house, with the exception of 
children under 14, and their mothers, and also of old 
people, must prepare themselves for transportation in an 
hour-and-a-half's time. 

An officer will definitely decide which persons will be 
taken to the concentration camps. For this purpose all the 
inhabitants of the house must assemble in front of it. In 
case of bad weather, they may remain in the passage. The 
door of the house must remain open. All appeals will be 
useless. No inmate of the house, even those who will not 
be transported, may leave the house before 8.0 a. m. (Ger- 
man time). 

Each person will have a right to 30 kilogrammes of lug- 
gage; if anyone's luggage exceeds that weight, it will all 
be rejected without further consideration. Packages must 
be separately made up for each person and must bear an 
address legibly written and firmly fixed on. This address 
must include the surname and the Christian name, and the 
number of the identity card. 

It is absolutely necessary that people should provide 
themselves in their own interest with eating and drinking 
utensils, as well as with a woolen blanket, strong shoes and 
linen. Everyone must carry his identity card on his per- 
son. Anyone attempting to evade transportation will be 
punished without mercy. 

■r .ii a -i ■,«..„ Etappen-Kommandantur.* 

Lille, April, 1916. 



*The "Etappen" are the German military depots on the lines of 
communication. 



THE BEITISH IN FRANCE 81 

iseems an infinitely delightful bit of poetic justice or humor. 
Not a great while before, according to one story I heard, 
the Germans bombed a certain military camp near the 
coast, where the French had a couple of thousand Anna- 
mite Chinese coolies in wooden barracks. Close to this 
labor compound was a barrack full of hoche prisoners. The 
flyers came down close enough to make sure they would not 
hit their own people, and carefully blew up a goodly num- 
ber of the helpless Annamites. Bombing a military estab- 
lishment being, of course, a perfectly ethical proceeding, 
the authorities had no valid objection. The Annamites 
had ! After the mess was cleaned up, they held a private 
council of war, decided that retaliatory measures were re- 
quired, and before the guards and sentries could interfere, 
had raged through the prisoners, cutting the heads almost 
off a considerable number with their long, heavy knives. 
Whether the tale is true or not, it is one of innumerable 
others which illustrate the risks, natural and freakish alike, 
to which every one along the front is exposed dav by day 
and almost hour by hour. 

Nearly five hundred years ago, British and French stood 
side by side in the market-place of Rouen, while bells 
boomed above the flames blooming around the sweet white 
face of Jeanne d'Arc. The great Hundred Years' War was 
drawing to its close. Once more a great war is drawing to 
its close. Once more British and French stand side by side. 
But in this twentieth century the mighty spirit of that 



§2 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

Maid of Orleans who once led her countrymen against the 
British hosts, now rises prophetic and energizing above the 
combined Armies to wave them on* through whatever may 
befall of danger or sacrifice, to the victory already shadowed 
in the Gotterdammerung slowly but irresistibly descending 
upon the war gods of the Hun. 



*Oxi several occasions bodies of French troops have reported 
that in the heat of action they have beheld a shining vision of 
the Maiden Saint. 



CHAPTER VI 

ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT 

The Staff Motor whirled along a deserted white ribbon 
of road between tall poplars etched black against the sunset 
skies. It was well after seven, and the air was chill with" 
the dew. Ahead of us somewhere in the rolling country 
that dipped and rose like the Atlantic swell lay the Amer- 
ican Visitors' Chateau, a lovely little sixteenth-century 
castle with slender turrets and a moat, where for a few 
days two other Americans and myself were to be guests of 
the British Government. Not a sound but the purring ex- 
haust of the motor could be heard ; we were the onljr living 
things in the whole vast landscape. 

No one spoke. Slowly the radiance died, and the stars 
came out. Our Staff Captain leaned forward in his seat 
beside the driver, screwing his monocle a little tighter into 
his eye and listening intently as he stared into the distance. 
Behind, we three looked and listened too. 

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom-hoom-hoom^boom! 

Low and heavy and hoarse, hardly audible at first, came 
the sullen grumble in Fritz's throat many miles away at 
the front, as he began his twilight "strafe." The sky flashed 
with a wicked red glare like heat-lightning. In that lurid 
instantaneous blaze woods and spires and the figures of 

83 



84 ' WITH ' THREE * ARMIES 



Captain and chauffeur splashed the sky with inky silhou- 
ettes. Twenty miles away somebody was "catchin' it ? ot ? " 
and we, far off, could hear the rumble, see the diabolical 
beauty of it, nothing more — the distant hiccups of Mars, 
reveling in his illuminated palace. 

Down into a little valley dropped the motor, whirled off 
to one side through a field, darted through a close-growing 
copse, and honked for the gateway to the Chateau grounds. 
Again we honked at the drawbridge, while a solitary white 
swan peered up at us curiously from the flickering waters 
of the darkly forbidding moat. Not forbidding in the least 
was the yawning stone portal, but delicately Gothic and 
inviting. So was the carven door of the structure itself 
f — beyond the cobbled court — where lights twinkled out to 
make us welcome. 

The great reception hall, from which a broad flight of 
oak stairs wound upward into the dark, was decorated in 
hit-or-miss fashion with German trophies of all sorts, from 
helmets and gas-masks to shell splinters like forked light- 
ning. To my astonishment, the restoration of the structure, 
which had been variously maltreated in its somewhat 
stormy past, had been a restoration for use, not beauty. 
The wooden paneling was glaringly of the cottage-by-the- 
sea order; only where the carven stone of graceful window 
or delicate molding peeped at one did the age and original 
beauty disclose themselves. But though the restoration was 
modern, the restorer evidently was not — he had forgotten 
or ignored modern heating, despite the dank autumnal 



ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT 85 

fogs that settle low in the little valley. In the salon, 
where every one gathered for those delightful evenings 
after dinner, a monstrous medieval fireplace crackled 
cheerily, and scorched our faces and toes. But only the 
generous assortment of tall and squatty, dark and brilliant 
bottles on the table could dispel that inner chill we Amer- 
icans all felt. 

Here gathered men of every stamp and every degree of 
ability and individuality. Our hosts were geniality and 
consideration personified. One officer was a professional 
soldier with a long Indian record, and a Britannic calm 
nothing could shake. Another was a member of one of the 
most famous regiments England has — and a Mississippi 
planter of twenty years' experience, whose cultivated Eng- 
lish was toned by the soft, languid drawl of our own South. 
Another had been a courtier before the war sent him to the 
front in a regiment noted for its fieriness and daring. Each 
one of them possessed — and exercised — personal charm, and 
did his utmost to show and tell us Americans everything 
we could legitimately expect. 

Right at the start, as a dessert after breakfast, we were 
initiated into the mysteries of the gas-mask, drilled in put- 
ting it on and wearing it, shown how to carry it ordinarily 
— hanging at one's side — and how, when in danger of a 
gas attack, it must be opened and strapped close up under 
the chin, where the face can be plunged into it at the first 
whiff of the sickly, hardly perceptible danger. The mask 
itself is not bad, but the clothespin clamped over one's nose 



86 WITH THREE ARMIES 

— suggestive of beauty-parlor treatments ! — compelling the 
wearer to breathe through the mouth-tube only, is dis- 
tinctly fretting. I had anticipated a genuine drill, in a 
gas-filled chamber, but that, it seems, is reserved for the 
fighting men. 

The Staff motors of the Chateau, speedy little low-hung 
cars painted a greenish khaki tone, are distinguishable by 
the white stencil on their sides of a somewhat impression- 
istic French castle that looks enough like the real thing to 
give the cars quite an air, and "set up" their occupants 
over the passengers in vehicles bearing less notable heraldic 
devices. Day after day in these manorial equipages our 
guardians carried us to different parts of the front — and 
the "back," which is quite as important — and in one re- 
spect only were they adamant: they would not let us risk 
our lives as recklessly as some of us wished in our en- 
deavors to see and know everything. 

What does the "front" look like? Is it a ditch filled by 
soldiers in khaki, leaning toward a similar, opposite trench, 
and, behind each, field guns neatly arrayed in batteries ? 

Standing on Vimy Ridge one brilliant September after- 
noon, I looked out over the slightly undulating plain that 
stretches away to Lens and Lievin, where both the British 
and German forces were entrenched. The two towns, save 
for obvious damage, looked entirely normal and quiet; even 
with powerful binoculars I could find not one trace of guns, 
trenches, camouflage, or anything that looked in the least 



ALONG THE BEITISH FEONT 87 

like a very active sector of the firing line. Not an English- 
man was in sight, but far in the background, two or three 
thousand yards distant, I could occasionally pick up a Ger- 
man with my glasses as he darted from one house or shelter 
to another. Nothing else moved. 

Lens is the center of a great coal district. Near it, and dot- 
ting the plain to our left, were the wrecks of some coal-mine 
structures, huge, gaunt, forbidding skeletons, lugubriously 
black and silent — wounded Martians, they seemed. Eight 
at our feet, partly concealed in a scooped-out hollow in the 
Eidge, was a monstrous nine-point-two British howitzer. 
Over it spread a messy-looking network of cordage and wire, 
supporting a tangle of branches, grass, scraps of cloth and 
burlap, and some painted bits of canvas — camouflage for 
the probing eye of the enemy observer, be he concealed in 
an 0. P. (Observation Post) — on the front everything is 
called by its initials — or scooting far overhead in a flying- 
machine. Beneath the screen the silent monster itself was 
no neat black or shining steel weapon, but a tricky figment 
of the imagination, shapeless and weird, a horribly smeared 
and dappled thing of ungainly curves and blobs of confus- 
ing colors. The futurist painters must have had prevision 
of this war ! About the breech lolled some artillerists, con- 
tentedly taking their ease. Here a man wrote a letter, an- 
other sprawled on his back in a comfortable dream, a third 
worked about the breech mechanism, a fourth smoked his 
pipe as he cleaned his personal equipment, while the officer 
lay in a makeshift chair reading a novel in pink covers. 



88 .WITH THREE ARMIES 

The whole sector was quiet. It was more than quiet: it 
was silent, absolutely silent, with the Sunday stillness of 
a country road in summertime, when the buzz of a fly is a 
loud sound. These intervals of silence are one of the great 
features of the front. They come at night, by day; at that 
ghastly, greenish-gray-heliotrope hour of before-dawn 
which the poetic French know as Vkewre mauve, "the 
mauve hour;" often between violent artillery actions. No 
one can tell when they will come nor how long they will 
last. They mean no relaxation of vigilance or hatred, and 
sometimes they end in a lively local strafe. But when- 
ever they come, they are a blessed relief to nerves tortured 
by shrieking shells and constant explosions. 

The sun poured down upon a glinting pool just this side 
of wrecked Lens, and bathed the shattered houses there 
with beauty. A crow suddenly cawed loudly. It was as 
startling as the boom of a gun. The artillerists looked up 
inquiringly. A dull boom shattered the calm somewhere 
out in front of us — it seemed as if the crow had given the 
signal to end the quiet. A mile away a put! of dust rose in 
the plain — Fritz was "sending a few over," evidently in 
the hope of hitting something British. The puff of dust 
rose, expanded, spread out into fan-shape, slowly blew 
away on the light breeze. While it was still expanding, we 
heard the distant note of the gun that had fired the shell. 
The gunners of the big howitzer returned to their peaceful 
preoccupations. Another shell came over. This time it fell 
a quarter of a mile nearer us, and we could hear the whistle 



ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT 89 

as well as the dull blast of its explosion. My Staff Captain 
— we were alone that day — thought we had better take 
cover in a convenient shell-hole; perhaps we had already 
drawn attention to the 0. P. near which we had been 
standing. 

A six-inch shell-crater made an uneasy mattress where 
we lay on our stomachs and watched Fritz "feel" blindly, 
as the artillerymen say, for something near us. His big 
gun fired methodically about once a minute, covering every 
square of the terrain in his particular field with beautiful 
precision. Aladdin's genii worked no more terrible or in- 
spiring wonders. An already ruined house, a bit of road, a 
tree, a piece of field rose in dusty smoke and vanished. I 
watched it, breathless with the hellish beauty of each thun- 
derous burst — at which my dry-nurse yawned or gave a 
casual grunt of disapproval. 

And now a new noise became distinctly audible. Half a 
mile or so behind us, a British aeroplane took wing, and 
cruised nonchalantly up and down, to and fro along the 
front, sailing with the motionless ease of a frigate bird 
at sea, only its eyes moving as it peered hither and yon, 
hunting for that German battery that was making the 
rumpus. Not a German machine was in the air — Fritz was 
"totally blind" that afternoon, and his gunners had to do 
what they could without the aid of their aerial observers. 
The big British machine covered the trenches in our sector 
thoroughly, and then calmly sailed across the German 
rearward lines, zigzagging to and fro above a furious burst 



90 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

of "Archies" (anti-aircraft guns) that "let go" at it in a 
beautifully timed and methodical fire so ranged as to cover 
a circular area at six different altitudes. Our British friend 
simply flirted his tail defiantly, made a beautiful dive like 
a gull striking for a fish — and moved on, replying inso- 
lently with two or three spatters of shot from his machine- 
gun which said plainly enough, "Oh, piffle !" 

Half an hour later the four winds shook with a rushing, 
mighty noise coming out of nothing from nowhere; soul- 
shaking, inconceivably awful. Who and what and how 
many were they, these flying daemons so far aloft, so per- 
fectly tinted the strongest glass could not reveal them? 
Twenty long, ominous minutes they were in passing. Not 
until afterward did we know we had heard the gathering 
of a great squadron of naval planes sent over in reprisal to 
bomb a German garrison and munitions town. I am glad 
not to have seen them: seen, their mysterious awfulness 
would have been lost. 

All this time our howitzer was silent. The British plane 
continued to cruise to and fro. Suddenly a man came from 
the dugout beside the gunpit and handed a slip of paper 
to the officer. The monstrous piece galvanized into life. 
The seven gunners — three we had not seen before appeared 
like prairie dogs popping out of their holes — jumped to 
their work, the monster shell was hoisted and rammed 
home, the charge placed in the yawning breech, the huge 
block swung shut and screwed fast. The officer barked a 
word. Back upon its dirty haunches jerked the gun, with 



ALONG THE BEITISH FEONT 91 

an earth-shaking roar and a belch of flame that shot fifty 
feet np into the air from its elevated muzzle. As the barrel 
swung back into position, the man at the breech opened it 
deftly, and a second sheet of flaming gas and sparks licked 
out with a vicious, curling vehemence: the backfire. 
Through the air shrieked the shell — sivoosli-slislish ! swoosli- 
sTislisli! swoosli-sJishsh! We tried to follow its flight with 
our binoculars. A dirty brownish-gray puff of smoke and 
an instant later a dull boom far away on the other side of 
Lievin rewarded us. Again and again the gun roared. 
The men moved swiftly and methodically, without haste, 
without excitement, but as steadily and rapidly as the per- 
fectly functioning parts of a machine — until five o'clock. 
Then they knocked off target practise ana had tea. Tea 
on the battle front ! I suspect the British heaven includes 
tea — and jam. 

Tea done, the howitzer began again, this time with cor- 
rected ranges, evidently, for only three or four shots were 
fired. The last one, instead of coming to our eyes and ears 
as a puff and a boom, came in a terrific concussion that 
shook even the Ridge where we were, and a blast of sound 
a thousand times heavier than any single shell could make. 
The nine-point-two must have landed a shell fairly on the 
ammunition dump beside the German gun, for silence fell 
again thick and soft. That same evening, only two hours 
after we had left the Eidge, one of our Captains at the 
Chateau came to me excitedly and said: "My word, old 
chap, they are simply shelling blazes out of Lens and 



92 WITH THREE ARMIES 

Lievin right now. Must have started almost as soon as 
you left." 

I cried out in disgust. "We lay out there all the after- 
noon and saw a nice lot of blue sky and a little desultory 
firing, and now you tell me they are really busy !" 

Captain looked his astonishment at such American 

sentiments; then he sobered. "It isn't quite as safe near 
that observation post now as it was then/' he remarked, 
and turned the subject. I knew then that one of those gal- 
lant observers on the Ridge must have "gone west." 

While we were still on the Ridge, a very raw young 
Canadian recruit hung about us like a friendly yet bashful 
child, asking questions and finally demanding of my 
courtier-Captain: "Say, would you mind letting me have 
your opera glasses a minute ?" 

To his eternal credit be it said that Captain X — — never 
batted an eyelash, but handed over his magnificent binocu- 
lars. Presently the Canadian unbosomed himself. In a few 
jerky sentences I would give a good deal to be able to re- 
produce, he told us how his only brother had been killed 
when the Canadians stormed the Ridge in April, how he 
had enlisted to avenge him, and how, actually on the scene, 
he was looking vainly for the exact spot where his brother 
had fallen. We left him, as we went down to our car, 
standing on the very summit of the Ridge, a clear target 
against the blue sky, still looking with timid, hungry eyes 
for the spot he would never find. 

Vimy and Lorette Ridges tell their own story of the 



ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT 93 

furious battle that for months swayed back and forth to 
determine whether the Hun or the Allies were to hold the 
commanding ground of that section of northern France. 
They are seamed and criss-crossed from end to end with 
the deep, ragged furrows of the trenches, pocked with 
craters, and covered everywhere (in September) with battle 
debris the Salvage Corps had not yet cleaned up. One had 
to walk carefully — unexploded bombs and grenades are 
tricky things, and the slightest touch may set them off. 
Here and there the shell-fire had blown trenches and dug- 
outs out of all semblance to anything but refuse heaps. In 
one place I found a big mound with two German snipers' 
steel body-shields partly protruding from it, and some 
German hand-grenades held fast beneath the debris in such 
a way — considering the scraps of gray uniform I could 
discern — that I did not care to pull them out. The Ridge 
is trying enough to mount in dry and pleasant weather, 
when all one has to dodge are shell-holes and wreckage. 
What must it have been when the Canadians swarmed up 
its slippery clay sides in the rain, under a torrent of fire! 
I wondered, too, as I climbed those grim slopes, just where 
it was that young Clancy of Texas first took the Stars and 
Stripes into action on a European field. 

Near the Ridges lie the almost indistinguishable ruins 
of the towns that once nestled under their shelter. Lorette 
in particular is a melancholy sight. The only structure 
that still looks as if man had built it is the stout old 
church ; roofless, half its walls shot away, brooding over the 



94 WITH THREE ARMIES 

surrounding desolation with the pallid despair of a kindly 
spirit whose efforts failed. In its little cemetery graves 
have been disemboweled and their dead scattered; monu- 
ments of stone and iron blown to atoms or bent and 
twisted into grotesque caricatures of their original pur- 
pose; huge mounds reared and huge holes dug; and right 
in the middle of it all, a squat, solid little stone marks 
the spot where the Germans buried one of their comrades. 

At Bapaume also the Hun had turned the burial ground 
into a rubbish heap, and here again he had buried his own 
dead. Over the common grave where scores of them were 
interred he had reared a heavy, typically Teutonic monu- 
ment. It struck a savage note standing there, while all 
about the graves of the Allies were marked solely with low 
white wooden crosses. 

The town of Bapaume itself is as shattered as one might 
expect after the terrific combats waged about it, but the 
most picturesque thing along the entire British front was, 
and I presume still is, if the winter winds have not de- 
stroyed it, at Albert. There the church had a very lofty, 
slender spire, with a gilded figure of the Virgin at its top. 
Cut almost in two by a shell, the tower swayed, broke, and 
fell half-way over, leaving the statue thrusting out at right 
angles from the rest of the steeple, its extended arm, once 
raised heavenward, now pointing straight at the German 
lines in mute denunciation of the outrage. 

Arras is perhaps the most thoroughly destroyed of all 
the large French cities along the British lines. SVhile thei 




Official British photograph— British Pictorial Service 

Arras Cathedral, taken from the eastern altar. As 
found by British troops 



ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT 95 

Germans held it, the British guns tried to knock it to 
flinders ; when the British first forced their way into it the 
Germans tried their best to make it too hot for their ene- 
mies. The result is the most ntter chaos imaginable; but, 
unbelievable though it seem, in this instance the very chaos 
is superb, instinct with a melancholy grandeur that in a 
measure compensates for its frightfulness. 

Some of the individual buildings leave memorable pic- 
tures : a house with every window blown in, and everything 
else blown out; an utterly gutted residence, roofless and 
floorless, with everything heaped in wild confusion in the 
cellar — and a shaving mug and brush still serenely stand- 
ing on half a mantelpiece; a piano with its whole front 
blown into the backyard, its rusty strings filled with plaster 
and dust, its keyboard a convenient shelf for machine-gun 
ammunition by the hundred; a cafe sliced neatly in two, 
with its bar and bottles in the standing half — and nothing 
broken. 

As we stood looking at the Cathedral one brilliant morn- 
ing, and marveling at the unique change shell-fire had made 
— in this case transforming one of the ugliest Renaissance 
churches in France into a sublime and inspiring ecclesias- 
tical ruin — we heard a noise behind us. One learns in the 
war zone to move quickly, to ascertain the meaning of any 
unusual sound on the instant. Across the street was what 
had been one of those tall, gangling, top-heavy French 
houses with each story pushing out above its fellows. The 
three upper ones had been battered into a tangle of beams 



96 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

and slates and stone; hardly a square foot of the fagade 
but was marked by shrapnel or rnachine-gun fire. The 
ground-floor shutters were making the noise, and as we 
turned toward them, they opened. A very pleasant, wrin- 
kled, ancient head thrust out, and a very pleasant old 
cracked voice wished us a very good morning. 

"Good morning to you, Madame," I responded, crossing 
the street to her, astonished to find a live creature in the 
midst of this desolation. "How long have you been in 
Arras ?" 

" Soixante-douze arts, Monsieur," she replied with a brave 
smile. "Seventy-two years, sir/' 

"Ah, yes — I understand. But I mean: How long have 
you been here since the bombardment?" 

"Soixante-douze ans, Monsieur" she smiled again. "I have 
never left Arras; not even when — " She finished the sen- 
tence with another courageous smile and a shrug that told 
volumes. 

It was unbelievable that any human creature could have 
endured the frightful storms which had raged from one 
border of Arras to the other for months. Shells had burst 
above her and shredded her house into matchwood; they 
had fallen in the street before her very door and blown up 
the sidewalk; they had howled and shrieked and bellowed 
and roared on every side. Men had fought with the fury of 
wild beasts all around her without harming a hair of her 
head, and now, when the titanic struggle was over, she was 



ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT 97 

still in the same place — existing no one could tell me how, 
and able to wish a cheery good morning to the strange 
visitors who came to look at her ruined Cathedral — one of 
the anomalies of a war in which the impossible has become 
the commonplace. 



CHAPTER YII 

FARTHER ALONG THE BRITISH FRONT — AND BEHIND IT 

A short sap, driven out toward Fritz — Fritz himself, 
invisible seventy-five feet away behind a tangle of barbed 
wire and a parapet of mingled earth and sandbags — a 
fresh-faced, pink-cheeked little English country lad, with 
a clear blue eye and a carelessly held rifle, peering steadily 
through his trench periscope — my Captain and I, stealing 
along sidewise through the narrow trench, like a couple 
of crabs. 

"Morning," whispered the Captain — we were too close 
to the Hun to risk ordinary tones — as the blue eyes came 
away from the eyepiece of the periscope for a moment. 
"How's hunting?" 

"Only one this morning, sir. 'ave a look?" 

The little sniper backed away from his instrument. The 
Captain glanced through, and turned to me. 

"Look through — he's out there near the Hun wire— lit- 
tle to the right." 

My unaccustomed eye searched the grass and debris and 
wire for several moments before I located the dead German, 
lying in an ugly tangle of twisted limbs, his face turned up 
to the sun, his rifle lying across his body, his crude helmet 
standing bucket-like beside him. I had seen dead soldiers 
before, so the silent figure gave me no shock. He was very 

98 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 99 

peaceful and calm, with, no further hair-raising patrols or 
raids to risk. But the executioner did shock me: he was 
so much the boy, so juvenile despite his practised eye and 
deadly finger, as he sat there at his periscope, calmly watch- 
ing for the least sign of a movement that he might send a 
steel messenger to it. One could think of him as dancing 
gaily with a pretty girl of a summer evening, or being very 
respectful to his mother — and here he was at one of the 
most dangerous posts on the line, responsible for the safety 
of the men in his trench, the spokesman of Death. 

After consulting the trench commander, my Captain 
said: "It's been pretty quiet here all morning. I guess 
you can risk a look over if you want to. But you must 
move your head slowly up, and right down again, without 
stopping an instant." 

At that moment the two other Americans joined us, and 
we made our way to a little bay where there were no sol- 
diers. I took my look last. It was not very satisfactory. 
All I could see was exactly what I had seen through the 
sniper's periscope, except on a much larger scale. There 
was the shell-torn ground between the two lines of trenches, 
the opposite tangles of barbed wire, the enemy's low para- 
pet. I never have been quite able to understand what went 
wrong. Perhaps I stopped moving long enough to locate 
myself to a German grenadier; perhaps the keen eyes be- 
yond that wire chanced to locate my position as I was rais- 
ing my head. Whatever the fact, a vicious crack ! tumbled 
me down into the bottom of the ditch, my helmet tinkling 



100 WITH THREE ARMIES 

with the splinters that glanced from it. Somebody had 
fired a rifle grenade at me, but I had luckily escaped with- 
out a scratch. My Captain looked annoyed. 

Behind me, on the shelf of a dugout, lay a handful of 
neat little Mills bombs, I was angry at being made a tar- 
get when I merely wished to peep, and so I reached for 
one. 

"Let me send him a souvenir !" I begged. 

"My word, no !" exclaimed the Captain hastily, stretch- 
ing out a forbidding hand. "You might start something 
that would cost the lives of fifty men before we got 
through. You might be killed yourself before we could get 
away." And then he added, in perfectly good American, 
with a smile at his own humor, "Nothing doing !" 

A Lieutenant in charge of a monstrous trench mortar in 
the sector tried to soothe my ruffled pride by taking me 
into his dugout to show me his "sty of flying pigs," and 
chuckled gleefully of "a pretty little strafe we're going to 
start at three o'clock. We've a clean hundred pigs for him, 
and the big uns behind are going to have a little practise, 
too/' 

His "pigs" were fat, monstrous shells with wings on 
their tails. The pot-bellied mortar that lobs them over in a 
graceful curve was a mournful-looking brute compared 
with the large howitzers and lean naval pieces or field guns. 
The "pigs," because of their wings, squeal horribly as they 
fly, and burst with a peculiarly loud and nerve-shattering 
detonation, declared by those who have lived through it to 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 101 

be infinitely worse than the duller boom of a much heavier 
shell. 

Before we left the trench, the music began, and it was 
sweet. Somewhere behind us to both right and left, a bat- 
tery went into action, throwing eighteen-pound shrapnel 
into the very trenches we had just peeped at. The sharp 
report of the guns, the whoooosh-woosh-woosli ! of the shells 
as they flew close above our heads, and the ugly bang! 
they made in front, were almost simultaneous. At first 
there was the irresistible inclination to duck at each one — 
which made the seasoned Tommies smile good naturedly. I 
wanted very much to stay for the real performance half an 
hour later, but my Captain was obdurate. When he thought 
I had seen enough, he hustled me away so fast that we were 
out of even ear-shot when the flying pigs began their el- 
dritch squealing. That was at Croisille, in that fiercely 
fought region where the long battle of the Somme finally 
gave dear-bought victory to the Allies. 

Never were there more mournful specters than I saw in 
one part of that bloody field — the tanks! Huge, weird, 
antediluvian monsters of rusty black, they lay motionless 
in the sticky clay not far from the highroad. Here one had 
received its death wound as it was crawling heavily from 
road to field, shivered and stood still on the edge. Its ugly 
black snout and ridiculous little rear steering-wheels some- 
how gave it the air, even in death and abandonment, of 
striving still to push on toward the vanished enemy. I 
clambered in through the roof — what a sight! Space 



102 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

enough, and not one whit more than enough, for the seated 
crew, the machine gunners and their snarly pets, the en- 
gines, the ammunition, the tanks for "petrol" and oil. 
That mangled interior told a story clear as day: the ex- 
ploding shell disabling the machinery; wounding or kill- 
ing the heroic crew; igniting the gasoline, whose terrific 
heat exploded the thousands of rounds of cartridges, tear- 
ing their brass shells into fantastic, curly shapes, and 
spraying the whole interior with bullets. I have one of 
the bullets in my pocket now, dented on the nose, chipped 
on the side, scratched and scarred, its leaden core melted 
out. 

Eour other tanks rested at various angles within a half 
mile or so, one rearing up on its ungainly haunches, one 
thrusting its rusty jaws into the mud it seemed to bite 
in its death struggle, one half turned over on its side; all 
of them terrible, ludicrous, inspiring — monsters from some 
prehistoric age who had gallantly come to help their puny 
masters, and died nobly on the field of honor. No wonder 
the symbol of the Tank Corps is the fire-spitting dragon, 
creature of legend and mystery ! 

The Butte de Warlencourt stands out from the plain 
of the Somme Gibraltar-like, a huge mound of gray clay 
so covered with craters and "duds" (unexploded shells) 
and fragments of shells, so writhingly torn apart and 
mangled, that it looks like nothing so much as the pitted 
floor of the moon. As I panted up its steep sides — where 
the various regiments whose simple, impressive monuments 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 103 

crown the summit, met glory's shining, deadly face with 
fearless vision — I wished a tank might be hauled to the 
very top and set between the stone shafts, that the gallant 
fellows who met a flaming death within their steel prison 
might have a temple the world could never forget. For 
the world will come here to the Butte after the war is done 
— "Cooking it" along the Somme field — and the tripperiest 
tourist of .them all could not but pause in reverence before 
such a memorial and go home to spread further still the 
fame of the dragon-men and their translation in their 
chariots of fire. 

Farther along, on the way to the great mine-crater of 
Pozieres, there were plenty of antitheses for the clumsy 
tank, with its three-miles-an-hour speed, and its clanking, 
roaring noises — the dainty, swift, noiseless carrier pigeons 
which are also a vital part of the Army's equipment. Not 
only here, but all along the rearward lines of the Allied 
Armies, their big, wheeled pigeon-cotes, like gipsy wagons, 
and their attendants' weirdly camoufles tents dot the land- 
scape, while the birds circle in airy flight overhead, or go 
soberly enough by messenger in light crates to the trenches, 
where they are released with dispatches for their particular 
headquarters. 

Pozieres crater is simply a huge, funnel-shaped hole in 
the ground, its white sides glistening in the sunshine. 
Nothing about it suggests even remotely war or any of 
war's activities. Yet to stand at the edge of this great 
crater and look across its perhaps three hundred feet of 



104 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

mouth and sixty or seventy of depth, is to visualize, in a 
way, the entire war. For a year or more, patient human 
moles burrowed endlessly in the saps, and hewed from the 
chalk the great chambers where the explosives were stored. 
Then, the pressure of a button somewhere in the rear, and 
the year's work went roaring up skyward in one forty- 
thousandth of a second. Men, guns, horses, the key-position 
of that section of the German lines, were all destroyed 
blindly, irrevocably, by this mechanical device that worked 
without personality or human feeling. 

The same thing transpired at Messines Eidge, where the 
huge mining operations that required almost eighteen 
months to complete, were made possible by the expert scien- 
tific knowledge of a quiet, modest, genial little old gentle- 
man who never had an unkind thought in his life. I found 
him in a little two-by-four room at one of the headquarters 
far behind the lines, humped over a rough kitchen-style 
table littered with maps and many bottles of colored inks, 
preparing, no doubt, for a fresh blow in some other vital 
spot. In the five minutes he gave me we talked — or rather, 
He talked, and I listened somewhat uncomprehendingly — 
in pure geological terms of Tertiary underlays, Jurassic 
formations, alluvial clays and the like, which did not at all 
correspond to the France I know. But Major Blank's 
knowledge goes deep down into primitive chaos and brings 
up in clear, ordered statements those indispensable facts 
that underlie the emotionless efficiency of the British Army. 

Efficiency also marks the C. L. C, or Chinese Labor Camp, 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 105 

an enormous compound fenced off by barbed-wire stockades 
about ten feet high, laid out in wide, regular streets at right 
angles, and filled with barracks, storehouses, workshops, a 
hospital, headquarters office, finger-print bureau, and so 
on. Here are no less than forty-five thousand sturdy 
Chi Li and Shantung laborers who release an equal number 
of Tommies for military duty. The coolies are elaborately 
catalogued and graded according to their capabilities and 
past experience. An unskilled laborer receives a franc a 
day, plus an allotment of ten dollars Mexican silver (the 
current coinage in coastal China, where a deal of it is 
manufactured from raw silver by the enterprising China- 
man) to his family every month. Interpreters receive five 
francs a day, with a monthly allowance of sixty dollars 
"Mex" to their families. This pay is net to the workers, 
who also receive, to use the Army term, "subsistence" — 
better and much more plentiful than they ever had at 
home : ten ounces of meat — an unheard-of luxury for most 
Chinese — eight ounces rice, eight ounces bread, eight 
ounces fresh vegetables, bacon, salt, eight ounces flour, and 
cigarettes or tobacco. In case of accident resulting in par- 
tial disablement, a lump sum of one hundred and fifty dol- 
lars or less, depending upon the injury, is paid the family ; 
in case of death or total disablement, this amount is three 
hundred dollars, "Mex." The working day is ten hours, 
and the general system much the same as that successfully 
used during the Boer "War in South Africa. 

So much has been written respecting the morals of the 



106 WITH THREE ARMIES 

Chinese in general, and of their addiction to narcotics in 
particular, that it is only just to state with emphasis that 
the morals of this coast camp in France are excellent. The 
worst charge the canny Scots laird in command could bring 
against them was that the Chinese are notoriously spend- 
thrift ! The French of the province have been very timid 
and offish toward these Mongolian strangers, and nervous 
mothers use them as bogies to frighten their children into 
obedience. John himself seems rather to enjoy his fear- 
some reputation, grins, minds his own business, and main- 
tains good order and decency everywhere. British disci- 
pline no doubt has a mighty influence in this respect ; so, no 
doubt, has the innate solidity of the Chinese character. 
Liberty outside the camp is carefully restricted, but plenty 
of entertainment is provided within bounds. The Y. M. 
C. A. huts — think of a Christian Association for Confu- 
cians ! — are supplied with phonographs and moving pic- 
tures: the Celestials show a strong preference for the ele- 
mental humor of the custard pie hero of the half -mustache 
and uncouth feet. 

None of the coolies have as yet been "lost," as the com- 
manding officer put it neatly, from this French camp, 
though one morning when he was out on his horse he 
chanced to meet a small group who had simply walked 
out of the gang with which they were working and begun 
wandering about the lovely French countryside. The Colo- 
nel knew they had no business to be where they were, and 
reined in his charger. 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 107 

"What are yon doing ont here ?" he demanded. 

One of the Chinese who conld speak a little English jab- 
bered a moment with his companions, and then turned 
back to the officer with a bland smile and a truly Gilbertian 
answer : 

"Jus' pickin' a few buttehcups," he said, and docilely 
turned his fellows toward their work. 

Only eleven of all the sixty thousand Chinese used in 
South Africa broke bounds for good. Long afterward the 
officer who now commands the C. L. C. in France, and who 
was then a junior in the South African camp, met some of 
them in the Congo, headed eastward, "walking home to 
China!" 

One morning we were detailed to inspect a training 
camp. When we reached it, after a thirty-mile ride through 
the country, it was as empty and desolate as a deserted vil- 
lage. Only the commandant was on hand. "Awfully sorry 
you chaps had your ride for nothing," he apologized. "In- 
teresting show, y' know. But at midnight I got orders to 
clean up, and by five this morning I had the whole ten 
thousand of my fellows out on the road. See anything of 
'em coming down ?" 

Had we seen anything of them? For nearly two hours 
we had had to run carefully, through an unending stream 
of artillery, transport trains, men of every arm, from 
Highlanders wearing the dark Gordon plaid to lean, swart 
Bengalese cavalry who saluted smartly with down-flung 
hand as we passed. Infantry and artillery, engineers and 



108 WITH THEEB ARMIES 

sappers, staff and horse were all going gaily forward — to 
what? They did not know at the moment. Neither did 
we, until some time afterward, when the "big push" that 
finally resulted in the storming and capture of Passchen- 
daele Ridge was announced. 

It was beautiful to watch, this efficient, ordered move- 
ment, "blind" to the last man, but perfectly confident and 
tremendously impressive. That had been my initial im- 
pression of the British — their orderly coherence and 
smooth movement. This same efficiency is everywhere — ■ 
never more noticeable than in the work of those unthanked 
gleaners, the Salvage Corps, whose endless toil is absorbing 
to any one with an eye for detail. The Major commanding 
a great salvage and ordnance depot at one of the Channel 
ports was so delighted in my interest that he spared me not 
a single particular of the system by which he was saving 
thousands of lives and millions of money for the Army. 
The Salvage Corps, by way of explanation, is a general 
picker-up and recoverer of everything dropped, lost, thrown 
away or shot down on the battle-field, or anywhere. Care- 
fully it sorts the gathered-up debris, and puts everything 
possible into use again — at that, the fiercely-fought actions 
leave behind unnumbered tons of materiel that is never 
recovered. 

In this particular depot during a single month — the Ma- 
jor showed me his report — nearly eighty thousand mess-tins 
alone had been brought in, cleaned, put in perfect condition, 
boiled in potash", polished and stored for reissue. Camp- 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 109 

kettles by the hundred, boilers for the field-kitchens, water- 
bottles and lanterns to an amazing total had been gathered 
up, put through the same process, even to the lanterns, and 
stored away in their bins. Nearly five thousand boxes of 
bandoliers represented the month's recovery of these indis- 
pensable cartridge-belts. As for the rag-pickers, they had 
repacked and weighed and stored almost three hundred and 
forty-eight tons of woolen rags alone, to say nothing of 
nineteen tons of waste paper weighed and baled and sent 
home. How did that amount of paper ever get to the 
front? The Major could not tell me. 

The two most interesting things, to me, going on in the 
vast establishment both concerned footgear: boots and 
horseshoes. Here are the items, as they stood on the Ma- 
jor's record of the animal footwear — 

New loose horseshoes received from the front, sorted 

and repacked for group, pairs 8,600 

Partly worn horseshoes sorted and issued, pairs. ... 625 
Unserviceable horseshoes dispatched to England, tons 497 
Rusty horseshoe nails rumbled and made fit for 
use, cwts 28.5 

Imagine ! Nearly a ton and a half of rusty horseshoe 
nails recovered, some of them from the shoes stripped from 
dead horses, thrown into an endlessly turning barrel with 
a few bits of leather to polish them clean, and turned and 
turned and turned until they emerged as shiny and new as 
if they had never been near the front ! And the four hun- 
dred and ninety-seven tons of useless shoes sent back to 



110 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

England to be remade — think of the number of reshod 
horses that means ! 

The boots and shoes for humans were not less interest- 
ing. Tommy can not fight on sore feet. As soon as his 
soles or heels wear down badly, his boots are turned over 
to the Salvage Corps, which also picks up quantities of such 
equipment in the trenches and on the field. All are 
brought to the depot, where two piles are made of them, 
those fit to repair and reissue and those condemned as use- 
less. The shoe-shop where the repairing is done would 
warm the heart of an American manufacturer. It throbs 
and roars with an everlasting clatter and din of thumping 
hammers and flashing stitching-machines, box-making ma- 
chines, all sorts of machines, many of which, I was in- 
formed, were American. The operators — about half as 
many women as men — never looked up. They banged 
away as if the life of the whole British Empire depended 
upon each individual's doing his level best every minute. 
The speed, the efficiency, the absence of lost motion in every 
way was a revelation. 

The condemned boots and shoes disappeared so fast it 
took a little looking to see what became of them. At a 
table out of which rose a sharp vertical knife, a seated girl 
snatched up the shoes from the mountain beside her, 
slashed sole and upper apart, and threw each part to a 
different side. The soles quickly went into a vast mixing 
bin where, with the addition of just enough broken box- 
Covers and other useless wood to start them burning, they 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 111 

vanished into the furnace that provides power for the whole 
establishment. The Major did not quite understand when 
I complimented him on utilizing everything but the smell, 
and suggested that it really didn't matter ! The uppers of 
the shoes, in the hands of another deft young woman be- 
fore a curving knife came to life on Tommy's marching 
feet as neat, well-oiled shoestrings. 

Besides these peaceful things, the Salvage Corps gathers 
shells and cartridges galore. In that one month it had col- 
lected, inspected and classified, in small arms ammunition 
alone, ten million rounds, picked up nearly two hundred 
thousand pounds of empty cartridge shells, and had ready 
for reissue almost four thousand "tin hats" which the Ord- 
nance Department fondly designates as "shrapnel-proof" 
notwithstanding the vast numbers that come back — I have 
one myself — with the plain evidence that head-armor is 
not proof, whatever its name. 

The colossal warehouses about the depot compound make 
the vastest department store in the world, with everything 
an Army needs ready for instant issue. There are even a 
few feminine frills, for the female auxiliaries — like the 
nurses, the "Fanys" (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), the 
plucky little "Waacs" (Woman's Auxiliary Army Corps), 
and the W. C. B.'s (the Women's Church Brigade), whose 
initials, annoyingly enough, do not lend themselves as a 
nickname — have to be supplied. 

One of the most vital of these units is the "Waacs." Re- 
cruited almost entirely from the women of the wage-earn- 



112 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

ing classes, this efficient body does much of the hard and 
dirty work — without which the domestic arrangements of 
the Army would surfer — such as scrubbing floors, cleaning 
house in hospitals and permanent camps, driving motors 
for special purposes, and so on. When they first appeared 
in France in their trim brown uniforms of short skirts and 
close-fitting jackets, cocky little hats of the same color, 
heavy brown woolen stockings and low shoes, the French 
unfortunately did not understand the reason for their ex- 
istence and looked very much askance. The English Army 
keenly resented that cruel misunderstanding. To correct 
the impression as far as possible, orders were issued that 
no officer or civilian should speak to any "Waac" under 
any circumstances except on official business. 

Not knowing this, I blundered into an impasse one after- 
noon at the door of a headquarters office. My Captain had 
to report, and left me standing by the curb, glad to stretch 
my legs while he was inside. A moment later a pretty lit- 
tle "Waac" came rushing out, and tried to crank a balky 
engine. She tugged and pulled and spun her motor, and it 
would not even gasp. I stepped over and asked if I could 
not crank it for her. A passing Frenchman stopped to 
watch and listen. The busy "Waac," her plump face 
flushed with her furious endeavor, gave me one terrific 
stab with her black eyes, said never a word, and with a jerk 
that nearly tore her in two, started her engine. Captain 
X emerged just in time to see the little comedy. As the 




Military pigeon house. Putting pigeon in basket with message 




Aviation camp (Marne). Cartridge belt for gatling gun 
and type of a flying chaser 



FAKTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 113 

"Waac" rounded a corner on two wheels, he laughed — the 
only time I ever heard a genuine laugh come from his 
silent lips. 

"I say, you know, you mustn't speak to 'em — it isn't 
done, you know," and he told me the story. The best part 
of it is, to the everlasting credit of the British Expedition- 
ary Forces, it really "isn't done," and the blessed little 
"Waacs" are as jealous of their lonely pride as a man is of 
his D. S. 0. 

The "Fanys" are English ladies, many of them young 
and lovely as well as independent financially; charming, 
low-voiced, clear-eyed, courageous girls who drive like pro- 
fessionals and fear nothing. Not a few of them turned 
their own luxurious motors into ambulances, which they 
keep in trim day and night with their own competent 
hands. While we were having tea at their headquarters, a 
"Fany" came in, and refused prettily to shake our hands 
when her own bore clear evidence of having just been in 
the tool-box and greasepot. But she was so tired and thirsty 
she had to have her tea before "cleaning myself, if you 
don't mind !" The "Fanys' " work is largely in the coast 
towns behind the front, where they respond to emergency 
calls, relieving the hard-pressed Army Medical Corps of a 
great deal of necessary and often very trying and danger- 
ous work. When we arrived at their hut an emissary of 
King Albert I of Belgium — a Count whose name I failed 
to catch — was conveying the personal thanks of His Majesty 



114 WITH THREE ARMIES 

to Mrs. Commanding Officer for the bravery and skill of 
her young ladies the night before, during an air raid which 
killed nearly a score of Belgian refugees. 

A badly wounded man ; special apparatus needed immedi- 
ately for laboratory work to help bring him back from the 
shadows; two little empty cartridge shells, a bit of cast-off 
wire, a tomato can; some hasty ingenuity, a little cotton 
wicking, some alcohol — and within a few weeks the badly 
wounded man trudging cheerily back to the front, very 
little the worse for the shrapnel splinter on which he had 
almost "gone west." 

How simple it sounds, that miniature Bunsen burner, 
when one tells of it afterward ! But how vital it was to 
wounded Tommy in his agony that the doctor had inventive 
genius and quick wit, skilled hands and the ability to 
utilize apparently useless things. Again and again, in oper- 
ating room and laboratory, in every branch of the hospital 
work, this cool, unhurried, self-sufficient British efficiency 
has made itself felt from the very beginning of the war. 
The particular invention referred to was shown me at a 
Canadian base hospital on the coast, where the clean salt 
air blows freely through every ward and puts life into the 
pale and wasted fellows on the endless rows 'of white cots. 

The morning Captain X started me off: with a laconic 

"see a hospital *s morning," I thought we were going to the 
first line. When we finally pulled up in a. big compound, 
flanked with roomy buildings on all sides, I was disap- 



FARTHER ALONG— AND BEHIND 115 

pointed, for we were in the outskirts of a large city, and 
I knew that here was a base hospital only. But perhaps 
the War Office in London knew better than I that the first 
line hospitals I had asked to see would not be either so 
interesting or so intelligible to me, besides being fuller of 
suffering and less suited to description. There was noth- 
ing to do but make the best of it, so, by grace of special 
permission, I went through ward after ward and watched 
the work going on. And what a place it was for interest- 
ing and unusual detail ! Here men have had faces rebuilt 
out of horrors, noses manufactured and grown to order, 
hopeless limbs saved and made good as new; and what 
hasn't been done to the long-suffering human insides — ! 
The good doctors have kept a record that shows less than 
one-half of one per cent, of their surgical cases die; only 
.54 of 1% of all cases, or, 2.5% less than hospital mortality 
in civil life. 

Besides the Canadians, who constitute practically all the 
cases regularly handled here, a short row of Portuguese, 
wounded in the sector to which this hospital belongs, 
showed swart but content among their fairer complexioned 
mates. They were little fellows mostly, hardly more than 
sturdy boys, but in their faces was a look never seen in the 
eyes of normal boys in time of peace. It is in every face, 
not only in this hospital, but wherever wounded men are 
gathered, whatever their nationality: a look of blank but 
utter content that has nothing of resignation about it, 
nothing of even eagerness to be well — simply content. It 



116 WITH THREE ARMIES 

is a look that at first hurts the beholder. What has robbed 
these men of their natural, human attitude toward recovery 
and life? Do they not wish to recover? Of course; but 
, while they have the opportunity to lie perfectly still in a 
clean bed, free of all "cooties" and mud and damp; while 
they can have some one feed them regularly with far nicer 
things than the Army mess-tins ever disclose; while they 
have privileges unnumbered and no hard, dirty or danger- 
ous work to do, they mean to enjoy it all to the limit. So 
they look somewhat as those blind from birth look : placid, 
content, neither hoping nor fearing, living for the blessed 
peace and fulness of the moment. 

As we came back through the hospital laboratory, I 
paused a moment to watch the improviser of the miniature 
hot-flame burner experimenting with some blobs of color 
on pieces of glass. Without looking up, he nodded over his 
work and said dryly he hoped somebody would some day 
have brains enough to catch that particular germ, or what- 
ever it was he was trying to isolate. It was his luncheon 
hour, but half the time he forgets to eat, and has to be 
dragged out of his steaming, smelly, multi-colored "lab," 
where efficiency is the one and only test, human life the 
only reward that counts. 

And there in that room, I think, is the keynote of Brit- 
ain's part in the war, there the reason for her success — the 
impulse to efficiency, the regard for humanity, the recogni- 
tion of principle as the principal thing. 



CHAPTER VIII 



HEROIC BELGIUM 



When Nature set strong mountain barriers between 
France and her eastern neighbors, she made one grievous 
mistake: she left a wide pathway around to the north — ■ 
the Low Countries. But was it a mistake? It has been 
desperately hard on Trance, hard on the heroic little Low 
Countries; but it has been of inestimable value to the sav- 
ages and barbarians to the east. It has given them en- 
trance to civilization from time to time ; and always, up to 
the present, they have become civilized when they came 
through and learned what civilization meant. To-day they 
have broken through again; the tumultuous raids of the 
past have been repeated in this twentieth century ; it is the 
business not only of civilized Europe but of the United 
States also — our business! — to see that history repeats 
itself, that once more the barbarians become civilized — this 
time clear back to the fountainhead, so there will be no 
barbarians left to break through in the future. 

All through the centuries — nineteen of them — fierce 
fighting raged throughout the Low Countries. Sometimes 
it was merely to force a passage through them to larger 
fields ; often it was for possession of the pathway itself, for 
it has always been a rich and tempting bait to the spoiler. 

117 



118 WITH THREE AEMIES 

A brave and gallant people have always inhabited this 
region — Caesar found that out before he penned the often- 
quoted line in his Gallic War, 'liorwm omnium fortissimi 
sunt belgae — of all these the bravest are the Belgians." 
With the Roman conquest, and subsequent civilization of 
the stalwart belgm, strong fortresses were built along the 
Rhine border to protect the new Roman province of Gallia 
Belgica; but the forts merely delayed instead of prevented 
the barbarian incursions. Again and again was the region 
invaded, and by the end of the turbulent fifth century — a 
time when the world must have seemed to the civilization 
of the moment going all to smash in the same way it seemed 
to us of 1914 to be going — all that is now Belgium was in 
the lusty hands of the Franks. 

In their turn they became civilized, Christianized, and 
fused with the Gallo-Romans ; but the fighting to and fro, 
the bitter periods of foreign domination, the terrible do- 
mestic quarrels and general internecine warfare went right 
on. And never, until 1831, when the Great Powers made 
a solemn treaty, decreeing Belgium an independent, con- 
stitutional neutral State, obligated to defend its neutrality, 
had the brave little country a chance to develop its destiny 
in peace. 

That treaty of 1831 was the famous "scrap of paper" 
which Germany, to her eternal infamy and anathema, tore 
up and repudiated in 1914, against the protests of Belgium 
herself, and of France and England, who also had signed 
it, and who are to-day defending it with their lives. In the 



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PEOCLAMATION 

In the future the inhabitants of places situated near 

railways and telegraph lines which have been destroyed 

will be punished without mercy (whether they are guilty 

of this destruction or not). For this purpose, hostages 

have been taken in all places in the vicinity of railways 

in danger of similar attacks; and at the first attempt to 

destroy any railway, telegraph, or telephone line, they will 

be shot immediately. The Governor, 

Von Der Goltz. 
Brussels, 5th October, 1914. 



HEROIC BELGIUM 119 

eighty-four years of peace that intervened between its sig- 
nature and its rupture, Belgium made a record of indus- 
trial, agricultural and political progress that constitutes 
one of the most remarkable chapters of modern history. 

It is a tiny country, physically, so little Uncle Sam could 
drop it into one waistcoat pocket and not know he had it ! 
With an area of only 11,373 square miles — 800 square 
miles smaller than our own State of Maryland — it had a 
population before the war of more than seven millions : the 
densest population, relatively, of any country in Europe. 
In that area, so congested, there existed a network of more 
than six thousand miles of highroads, all either paved or 
macadamized, as compared with less than two thousand in 
1830 ; 1,360 miles of waterways, including both rivers and 
canals; 2,900 miles of railways, and steam and electric 
trams and narrow-gauge railways everywhere. We always 
think of Belgium as pre-eminently a manufacturing coun- 
try, and she was, with imports and exports that more than 
trebled since 1870; but it must not be forgotten that it 
was also a farming country with a full third of its popula- 
tion engaged in agriculture upon six and a half million 
acres of the most intensively cultivated land imaginable. 
But while these frugal, industrious, wide-awake people were 
busy developing their resources and building up a wonder- 
ful structure of enterprise and commerce, Germany was 
gathering her vast resources against the time when, as 
Professor Albert Bushnell Hart so aptly put it, the Prus- 
sian Guards would go "gaily goose-stepping over Belgium !" 



120 WITH THREE AEMIES 

To-day all there is left of free Belgium is a narrow 
strip in the west. This unconquered section reaches from 
just below Meuport to the French border, a strip about 
the size of Greater New York, containing only one real 
city, Furnes, and a few scattered hamlets, all more or less 
scarred by long-distance bombardment or by the bombs 
dropped on them in the continual air raids. The principal 
outstanding features of this plain of Flanders, with its 
slow, placid streams between endless bordering lines of 
poplars, its quaint, quiet villages cuddling under their full 
red tiles or thatch, and its charming country houses half 
hidden in gardens, are, or rather, were, church spires and 
windmills. What a part in the early fighting those sleepy- 
looking windmills played ! Eor a year or more nobody had 
time to notice that whether there was a breeze or not, their 
gaunt and creaking arms moved every now and then — ten 
degrees right; stop; three degrees back; stop; twenty de- 
grees right ; and so on. And then they caught a spy — mov- 
ing one — betraying Belgium in regular code. Overnight the 
mortality among windmill spies jumped one hundred per 
cent., and the great arms moved no more ! 

The Belgian Government is still quartered in France, 
and the rendezvous for all intending visitors to the front 
is a certain city in the British zone. At the Military Con- 
trol established at the exit from the station, I was waiting 
in line, behind a long string of returning soldiers, towns- 
folk and peasants to have my papers examined, when a 



HEROIC BELGIUM 121 

hearty, trusty, radiantly good-humored voice the other side 
of the wicket exclaimed : "Say, ain't you an American ?" 

I looked up quickly. Eacing me were two Belgian officers, 
one a Major of the General Staff, the other a Surgeon- 
Captain. The Major was small, lean, nervous, deeply red- 
dened of face by constant exposure to the wind and sun; 
the Captain a very mountain of a man, six feet and more 
tall, gray-eyed, big-mouthed, his sunburnt face wrinkled 
all over with the merry lines of optimism and good humor. 
He grasped the iron bars of the gateway in one of his huge 
hands — and the officials looked up in consternation as he 
unintentionally almost shook the structure to pieces. He 
made me think of a Saint Bernard that had "grown enough 
but not grown up/' But his good humor was infectious. 
I laughed, the Major — to whom conducting all sorts of 
persons over the front was an ancient tale largely without 
savor — laughed ; even the annoyed Control officials laughed. 
So did the soldiers and citizens as they let me slip through 
and shake hands with my new friends. 

"Gee !" remarked the Captain, releasing the pulp that 
had been my perfectly good hand. "I sure am glad to see 
a real American again ! I've only been away from Norway 
two years, but it seems like an age. You're goin' to have 
the time of your life up here if we can give it to you !" 

Norway ! And I had thought him a Belgian. Where and 
how had he learned Americanese, and slang? I asked him. 

"Norway, Mich,!" retorted the Captain, abbreviating the 



122 WITH THREE ARMIES 

name of the State. "Some town, too, believe me! Been 
practising there for twenty years. I didn't want to come 
over — but, gee, what could I do ? I'm a Belgian, all right, 
all right ; but now — say, I'm two-thirds American, at least. 
Wish I hadn't come over and got into this dam' scrap. It's 
making me thin as the dickens !" 

Major L and I smiled at each other, while the Cap- 
tain prattled on cheerily, mixing his three languages with 
delightful inconsequence, sometimes beginning a sentence 
in English, ending in Flemish, and sandwiching in the 
official Erench for good measure. Outside waited a Staff 
motor. As we rolled along, the Major explained in his 
beautiful French that I was to be quartered in the maritime 
railway station hotel, so familiar to millions of passengers 
from France to England in other days. 

"The bodies come over every moonlight night and try to 
bomb the station and the docks and ships," he explained 
cheerfully, "but they haven't hit it yet, and it's really about 
the safest place you could be. If there is an alerte, a bell- 
boy will warn you, and you can go down into the cellar if 
you like." 

I had promised myself some sensations at the front, and 
here was one miles behind it ! 

Throwing my window on the top floor wide open, I 
looked out on a vivid picture brought about by the war. 
Oh, those sporting English! In a shallow pond about a 
quarter of a mile long and from twenty-five to a hundred 
yards wide, a dozen of them were swimming and playing 



HEROIC BELGIUM 123 

like young seals, while two four-oared, two pair-oared and 
two single-scull gigs were paddling about. Overhead cir- 
cled a Belgian hydroaeroplane. Suddenly, with a roaring 
hum, the avion swooped right down among them, frighten- 
ing away the ducks feeding about the edges, but not the 
Englishmen. It flew fifty yards a foot or two above the 
water, and dropped gently in without a splash or ripple, 
turned easily, and stormed along in a shower of spray to 
its hangar, where waiting mechanics, in the water to their 
waists, seized and drew it inside. While this was going on, 
a combination of English, Canadian, Australian and High- 
land troops in full kit were plodding along the seaward 
edge of the pond on their way to the distant trenches, and 
French children were playing about on the levees between 
pond and road and the sea, whose dull roar was very 
soothing. 

Meantime the moon came slowly up. It was nearly full, 
and the skies cloudless. Not a breath of air stirred as it 
climbed the heavens — an ideal night for a raid. About 
five hours later the raid came, the station was aimed at, 
and the bombs, as usual, went far astray, most of them 
landing in open fields and untenanted streets. 

Under the guidance of the Major, who proved the most 
fascinating of ciceroni, I was hurled around melancholy 
Belgium — all there is left of it — slammed to and fro, 
hither and yon, in a motor whose merciless chauffeur 
scorned anything as speed that did not send the needle 
trembling up around seventy or eighty kilometers an hour. 



lte ' WITH THREE ARMIES 

Traffic was no obstacle. Trucks, guns, soldiers — he passed 
them all so close a knifeblade would have filled the gap 
between. Many a time in the dusk on our way back to my 
dangerous hostelry, a shower of tiny sparks flew up from 
the whirling of our steel-studded tires upon the macadam- 
ized road. And once, in inky darkness and drizzling rain, 
running without headlights at that eighty-kilometer pace, 
we covered a greasy, slippery stretch of new-made roadway 
by turning completely around and skidding over it stern- 
foremost on to the macadam. The chauffeur swore softly, 
slowed for just long enough to regain control and turn 
around, and pelted off again without so much as giving a 
backward glance to see if the Major and I had not been 
flung out by the terrific swing. Ko cup-race could hold any 
terrors for that twenty-year-old soldier-driver, who three 
years before had been in one of the Belgian universities, 
and whose blond good looks and boyish manners com- 
pletely belied his utter lack of nerves and his daredevil 
performances, day and night, with that car. 

Seven o'clock the morning after my arrival saw us on the 
road, headed north, and never a more inspiriting picture 
unreeled itself than the one spread before us as we flew 
along that jammed and sweating main road beside the 
canal, of which mention has already been made in describ- 
ing the rear of the British zone of operations. And pres- 
ently we were in Gravelines — moated, massively fortified, 
medieval Gravelines — as picturesque a fortress of its sort 
as Carcassonne of the south is of its. Beyond lay the Bel- 



HEROIC BELGIUM 125 

gian border, with the road flying out ahead of us straight as 
a string for miles. The driver stepped on his accelerator, 
and we finished the forty-five kilometers from our starting 
point to Eurnes, including all slow-downs for. traffic in 
the numerous towns and villages and the semi-circular 
twist through Gravelines, in exactly forty minutes. 

Furnes! How shall I describe that silent, motion- 
less, emotionless ghost of a city? How conjure up the 
picture it made that brilliant September morning as our 
car halted, panting and dust-covered, in the main square, 
with the tall, high-gabled church on one side, Spanish 
House at one angle, the town hall near the church and all 
about lofty, step-gabled houses and shops with faces such 
as one sees mostly in dreams ? Here was surely the abode 
of peace. In this market square only such a little time be- 
fore the black-smocked men sat behind their stalls with 
black-frocked women wearing white caps and wooden shoes. 
Here a little later King Albert gathered one of his heroic 
regiments in hollow square while he decorated its colors 
with the insignia of heroism. And now there are shell- 
holes through the roof of the church and the elaborate 
carven porch of the town hall. Many a house is shattered 
within, and unsafe to explore. The citizens have most of 
them vanished, blown to every wind of heaven, and between 
the smooth-worn stones of the cobbled streets grass has 
begun to sprout right cheerily. Yet, still capable of liv- 
ing again as it has lived so many hundreds of years already, 
Eurnes waits — simply waits. 



126 WITH THREE ARMIES 

But with so much to see, Major L — — gave me a scant 
opportunity to explore lovely old Furnes, and we sped on 
out into the open. The region utterly blasted and destroyed 
does not begin until the vicinity of Pervyse is reached. 
What a series of towns ! Pervyse, Oude and Nieu Cappelle, 
Lampernisse, Caeskerke, Avecappelle, Oostkerke, Rams- 
cappelle and their neighbors, almost nothing but stark 
ruin. The church at Loo, with its crucified Christ hurled 
from the wall full length into the broken stone that fills 
the nave; the one at Lampernisse, with only half a dozen 
of its inner arches still erect; the ghastly silhouette of 
Ramscappelle, ragged against the sky, and its railroad sta- 
tion, shot into a sieve, with a bullet-pierced locomotive 
half-buried in debris that for three years has been un- 
touched; that school for little girls, with a shell-hole 
through the fagade and a tumbled heap of plaster and 
wood-work over the deserted benches — and the chalk still 
lying on the dusty ledge of the big blackboard; the vast 
railroad yards at Adinkerke, reconstructed and humming 
with the business of war; all this and more came into that 
first day of vivid impressions and furious driving. 

What a people these kindly Belgians are! They think 
nothing of driving a visitor at a deadly pace twenty miles 
for luncheon and forty for a bed day after day, no matter 

what the weather. Major L took me from the front all 

the way back to Dunquerque for luncheon, and afterward 
slammed me back to the front again so fast it took an hour 
for my breath to catch up with me when the car stopped 




Mr. Riggs — second from the left— and Belgian soldiers 
just from the trenches 




The Calvary at Crapeaumesonil 




Official Belgian photograph" 

Inundated section of No Man's Land between Belgium and German 
trenches near Dixmude. The sentry is a Belgian 




First line of defense before the village of Ramscappelle 



HEROIC BELGIUM 127 

and hid behind a ruined farmhouse. Along a very much 
battered road we tramped, coming at last to a spot where it 
simply vanished in a refuse heap. "Fighting here/' the 
Major said. Around us the swampy-looking fields full of 
rank grass and weeds were pitted by shells, some of which 
had fallen only that morning, and dotted by the ruins of 
a few isolated farmhouses and outbuildings. 

We struck out across a field, on a path between screens of 
ragged burlap camouflage and weird combinations of wat- 
tles and dried grass, twisting around hummocks and dodg- 
ing shell-holes, until a very large and shattered stone farm- 
house blocked the way. Major L ■ stopped for a moment 

to speak with another officer, and I wandered on into a roof- 
less bay of the house. A bayonet was thrust at my chest, 
and a surly- voiced sentry demanded something in Flemish. 
I backed away a few inches. The shining steel kept right 
after me; pressed a little harder against my coat, in fact. 
My reply in French failed to satisfy the sentry, who either 
could not or would not understand. Things looked squally 
for a moment. At the front they have a habit of dealing in 
summary fashion with men in civilian dress who do not in- 
stantly account for themselves — and the finger snuggled 
against that Mauser's delicate trigger looked very nervous 
to me! 

In came Major L . Without moving a muscle, the sen- 
try demanded sharply of him the password, his business and 
papers. The Major replied curtly, ordered him off, and 
moved toward me. The loyal fellow did not budge. He 



128 WITH THREE ARMIES 

merely raised his voice. The Major produced his papers 
and again ordered the sentry to go back to his post. While 
the argument waxed warm, a young Lieutenant suddenly 
appeared, hailed the Major, whom he fortunately happened 
to know, vouched for him to the sentry, and released us. 

It seemed a very strange proceeding until after a few 
words in Flemish between my Major and the Lieutenant, 
I was ceremoniously ushered up a perpendicular iron lad- 
der bolted to the reinforced chimney, and found at the top, 
inside a yawning shell-hole, an artillery observation post. 
The fact that at any moment the Germans might send over 
a shell and blow the post into bits had no effect upon the 
observer's nerves, and he looked every inch the stolid 
Fleming. But when the moon made weird shadows 
and the ghosts of the Belgian and German dead gibbered 
above the marsh; when the rickety old house creaked and 
swayed, and unimaginable noises came from nowhere — 
"Ugh I" he exclaimed, "mon Dieu, mats c'est lugubre, tres, 
ires lugubre!" 

Sitting down before the graduated scale upon which his 
powerful glasses were mounted, I looked straight into the 
loche lines in Dixmude, barely visible with the naked eye 
as a thin, grayish-brown shadow among the woods on the 
other side of the region the Belgians had flooded by cutting 
the sluices and dykes and letting the Yser run over it. But 
with the glass ! There was the blasted wreck of the church, 
the gaunt house walls, the tortured trees in the streets and 
between town and river-bank. There were the Huns them" 



HEKOIC BELGIUM 129 

selves, barely distinguishable figures in uniforms so nearly 
the color of the background they could be seen only when 
they moved, which they did freely. In the foreground the 
iYser and its overflow blotted out everything, concealing 
with its muddy waters the now well-washed bones of the 
thousands, Belgians, British and French, as well as their 
German adversaries, who had fallen in the desperate fight- 
ing that has raged all over the inundated region, where, if 
a man is wounded and drops into the numbing cold water 
and slimy, viscous clay, he has small chance of emerging 
alive. In fact, the medieval horrors of storming a city 
across its moat were nothing to fighting through a moat 
such as this, miles long and six hundred yards wide ! 

That night, as we dined in the railroad station restau- 
rant, the boche came flying over again on his moonlight 
pranks, and aimed a bomb or two at us. One of them, alas, 
fell squarely upon a car full of Belgian permis'sionaires go- 
ing gaily off to Paris for a ten-day visit. When the 
frightful crash was over, twenty-two of them lay dead, and 
thirty-seven others were desperately wounded. Not a man 
in the car escaped some injury, and twenty-eight of them 
died before morning. 

We heard the alerte from the siren, the elam@r of the 
barrage firing, then the wicked detonation of the bombs. 
Nobody stirred, and dinner proceeded without comment. 
But just before we were ready to leave, a white-faced mes- 
senger searched the dining-room, and came straight to our 
table. 



130 "WITH THREE ARMIES 

"Captain !" he exclaimed, then lowered his voice and 
whispered an order. 

Captain-Doctor B turned to me with an apologetic 

smile and tried to make light of what I knew was a serious 
call. 

"Now, ain't that too bad ! Some boob over in my shop's 
gone an' got the colic and he wants me — just when we were 
having such a splendid time!" 

"Camouflage, Doe !" I smiled back at him. "Tell me the 
truth. Anybody hit?" 

Eor a second he hesitated, his big hand crushing the edge 
of the table; then his hatred for the boche flared up in the 
most violently profane cry I ever heard. 

"Yes ! A whole car full — damn him ! Damn him!" 

He groped his way heavily out, brushing the diners aside 
as if they had been children, himself whimpering like a 
child: 

"Oh, mes pauvres en fonts! Mes pauvres en f ants! Oh, 
my poor children ! My poor children !" 



CHAPTER IX 

OF ALL THESE THE BRAVEST ARE THE BELGIANS 

Major L — — took me to the scene next morning. The 
bomb had fallen on the car not a quarter of a mile from 
where we dined. Already the tracklayers had filled up the 
big hole, relaid the rails, burned the fragments of the de- 
stroyed car and put the other derailed ones back upon the 
track again. As our motor halted to give us a good look, 
our chauffeur suddenly shivered and crossed himself. My 
eyes followed his. The damage had been repaired. But 
the stone wall beside the track — ! 

Being slammed around the unsubmerged tenth of Bel- 
gium was all very well, but it was not securing me the audi- 
ence with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, whose results I had 
rashly promised an American magazine. The interview 
had been requested through the usual channels, and all the 
necessary formalities observed. I knew we were not many 
miles from the little country town where the royal residence 
has been made for months. I knew also that no pomp or 
flummery characterized the establishment, so I spoke rather 
confidently to my Major about it. 

He sighed. "Ah, our Queen ! I am afraid you can't see 

131 



132 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

her to-day. She is a housewife as well as a Queen, now. 
To-day she is moving !" 

The very impossibility of the excuse satisfied me mo- 
mentarily. Later I caught Major L looking too con- 
scious, and taxed him with evasion. 

"Well," he replied, after a good deal of fencing, "the truth 
is, Fm sorry to say, she is not going to see you. You see, 
there are fifty correspondents who have made that request. 
If she granted you an audience, there would be forty-nine 
madmen who would make life too miserable for anybody 
in Belgium to endure! Perhaps you will be as lucky as 
another American — I've forgotten his name. He was re- 
fused an audience with the King, and the very same day 
met His Majesty accidentally in a hospital and talked 
with him for half an hour. Ten minutes is about the limit 
for such things officially. Maybe we shall meet the Queen. 
But she is terribly shy, our little Queen — I warn you !" 

I kept my eyes very wide open after that, and pulled 
every political wire I knew of, in both Belgium and Paris, 
but without any other result than profusely courteous tele- 
grams and letters regretting to state, and so on. Major 

L tried his best to make up to me for the dissappoint- 

ment. He showed me things not usually given to visitors to 
behold, things impossible to relate; finally he took me 
through a long, dangerous, winding boyau or communica- 
tion trench, and then by boardwalk over terrifying marshes 
where shells still dropped, and by sighing willows that 
mourned their stricken country, to the fire trenches at the 




R WlLHELMl 




AN SEEN OSTHE 

im Dezember 1914 



Seid Ihr eingedenk, dass Ihr das auser- 
wsehlie Volk seid! Der Geist des Herrn ist 
auf mioh niedergekommen, denn ioh bin 
der Kaiser der Deutsohen I 

Ich bin das Werkzeug des Aller- 
hoschsten I 

Ich bin sein Sohwert,semStellvertreterl 

Ungltick und Tod seien alien denen, 
die meinem Willen widerstehen ! 

Ungltick und Tod seien denen, die an 
meine Mission nieht glauben! Ungltlck 
und Tod den Feiglingen I 

Sie sollen umkommen. alle Feinde des 
deutschen Volkes 1 

Gott verlangt ihre Vernichtung\ Gott, 
der Bucb durcb meinen Mund beflehlt, 
seinen Willen auszufQhren ! 

WILHELM II. 



PROCLAMATION 

Of William IT, to His Army of the East, 
December, 1914 

Remember that you are the chosen people ! 

The spirit of the Lord is descended upon me because I 
am the Emperor of the Germans ! 

I am the instrument of the Almighty I 

I am His sword, His representative ! 

Disaster and death to all those who resist my will ! 

Disaster and death to all those who do not believe in 
my mission ! Disaster and death to cowards ! 

May all the enemies of the German people perish ! 

God orders their destruction and God commands you 

through my mouth to do His will. 

William II. 



THE BRAVEST ARE THE BELGIANS 133 

edge of the inundated section. In a few moments a con- 
cealed battery of 150's — six-inch guns — began to intone 
their daily litany. I felt as though Vesuvius had suddenly 
"let go" right under me. The roar and shriek of bombard- 
ment is terrific. But the unexpected discharge of a big gun 
behind an absolutely silent line, is nerve-racking. The 
shells went so far I could see no result of the Belgian 
strafing, and the enemy made no answer to the raucous 
challenge, fortunately for me — there seemed no hiding 
place for my indecent length behind the low defenses. 
There are few real trenches in this part of Belgium — the 
ground is too moist. Usually, as in this case, there are 
mounds of earth and sandbags, breast high, with dugouts 
and ingeniously-contrived shrapnel-proof shelters burrowed 
into them, the marshy ground or water reaching up to the 
men's very heels. 

Here, the marshes behind, the inundation before, bat- 
tered houses in the distance, ammunition dumps in danger- 
ous proximity to both their batteries and the trenches 
themselves, all the sadness of Belgium seemed concentrated. 
The soldiers looked wooden and stolid, creatures who had 
lost everything, who had become inured to hopelessness, 
who had no joy in even the fierce exaltation of combat. 
They gave me, the stranger, one glance, and paid no further 
attention. Not even curiosity stirred in them until Major 
L remarked to a Sergeant that I was an American. In- 
stantly the man became human. I asked him to tell me of 
his country, of what she has suffered, of whether America 



134 WITH THREE ARMIES 

has really done as much for Belgium as we at Home like to 
think we have. 

In broken French — he was a Fleming, and spoke French' 
but indifferently — he painted a picture of the Belgian re- 
sistance, of the horrors of that desperate first year of fight- 
ing, when the men stood for weeks on end thigh-deep in 
ice-water and slime, until their feet were eaten alive by the 
little white worms they had no time or opportunity to clear 
away ; of the desperation of that stand along the Yser, when 
they had six rounds of cartridges apiece for their rifles, 
and about four for the field guns ; of the horrible attempts 
at bayonet work with Belgian bayonets less than half the 
length of the German, when only the guts (his word) of 
the Belgians carried them on at all ; of the drowning out of 
the countryside, with farm and home vanishing in the dirty 
gray waters before their eyes; of the populace burned to 
death, shot, speared like eels, poisoned, whipped and beaten 
with every degree of savagery, deported in droves, coerced 
into slavery ; of the hideous, systematic starving of the rem- 
nant of the Nation, with hollow-eyed babies clawing at 
their skeleton-like mothers' flat and empty breasts and 
wailing feebly for the food that was not there — or any- 
where ; of America's aid, with the one pitiful meal a day it 
made possible as the sole salvation of men, women and chil- 
dren ; of the endless bread-and-soup lines winding down the 
streets in rain and storm, holding their tatters together 
with shivering, emaciated hands, while full-fed bodies 
gibed at their pitiful condition — and took care always, 



THE BRAVEST ARE THE BELGIANS 135 

"yellow dogs" that they were — oh, the bitter, bitter, con- 
tempt in his face and voice! — to keep well clear of the 
Hunger-maddened hands that would eagerly have torn them 
apart; of the American declaration of war at last, after 
nearly three years of aloofness. 

I wish I could convey the cynical inflection of the Ser- 
geant's voice as he told of his and his comrades' view of us 
as a new ally, and their belief — bred largely, no doubt, by 
the overt sneers of the Germans, which permeated the 
whole of Europe — that we were coming in nominally to 
fight, really to make a few more billions in some huge con- 
tracting scandal. And I wish I could picture his face — « 
and the faces of the men, who by this time had crowded 
around — as he sketched in a few vivid sentences the slowly- 
dawning consciousness on the part of all Belgium, from 
King to peasant, that our colossal plans were actually in 
earnest! His cold blue Flemish eyes fired into steely 
sparks as he talked, blazed when I asked him what he and 
his companions thought of President Wilson. 

"Six months ago," the Sergeant said, "we all spoke of 
him as 'L f Homme aux notes/ and { Le Pedagogue' " (The 
man that writes notes, and the Schoolmaster.) "To-day 
we know him. We were mistaken, mon Dieu! He is the 
savior of Europe ; perhaps," his voice fell to a reverent note, 
"the savior of the world. He is the genius of the hour !" 

Before the tribute of this simple Flemish soldier I stood 
mute. What we had done seemed so paltry, go meager, 
when a whole station was starving at our very doors, and, 



1361 WITH THKEE ABMIES 

civilization and Christianity were at stake. We had sent a few 
million dollars, a few shiploads of foodstuffs and clothes. 
But we Had not stricken our armed hands into the hands 
extended across the sea. We had not even listened to the 
voice of ordinary common sense and begun to prepare, 
Awhile there was time, for the struggle inevitable. Now, 
;witK what Lloyd George has so aptly described as our 
typical "volcanic energy," we were trying to make up for 
the opportunity the time-serving politicians had thrust 
aside. But we were late, oh, so late, that this praise and 
gratitude struck painfully deep, as much a ruthless indict- 
ment as it was praise. 

To it all Major L listened gravely, nodding his appro- 
bation of the Sergeant's glowing words. Before we left 
him, leaning there against the parapet and caressing his 
worn rifle with skilled fingers, I said to him : "And now, 
mon brave — . The Belgians will still resist, will go on 
fighting?" 

His lean fingers tightened on his weapon. "To-day we 
are happy," he said simply. "I am, my squad" — he waved 
about him at the listening infantrymen — "is, the whole 
Army is, our King is ! When the last Belgian dies, we shall 
stop fighting." 

Major L and I walked back over that lugubrious, 

creaky boardwalk beside the willow trees and the ammuni- 
tion dumps in silence. "When the last Belgian dies !" The 
Sergeant's tone implied that he believed the last Belgian 
might die — but that the cause for which they fought would 



THE BEAVEST ARE THE BELGIANS 137 

be carried on and on, until the beaten Hnn would cry for 
mercy. 

It does not make any difference what England has done 
or may do ; it does not make any difference what France has 
done or may do; or Italy, or the United States. The fact 
remains, whatever any one says about the Belgians — and 
there has been sharp criticism in many quarters, accusing 
them of slacking and ingratitude in foreign countries since 
the first terrible year — that Belgium, and Belgium alone, 
saved civilization by interposing a solid dam of her own 
living flesh and blood which held back the wave of Gorman 
frightfulness until France and England could reach the 
field. And so long as one single Belgian man, or one Bel- 
gian woman, or even one mutilated Belgian child remains 
with a flickering spark of the Belgian spirit in him or her, 
Belgium is not dead, but alive and fighting still ! 

To write of the sufferings of the Belgians without pas- 
sion is to be bloodless and devoid of humanity ! Their full 
story can never be told in prose ; and the poet to hymn the 
epic of Belgium is not yet born. What singer of to-day 
could tell the story of that German sentry in the prison in 
Dinant who calmly strangled a Belgian baby in its mother's 
arms, because its hungry wailing annoyed his gentle 
nerves, or of that wretched old man hanged by the neck 
just high enough to let him rest his weight first on one 
desperately stretched leg and then on the other, balancing 
thus for hours while his murderers laughed at his frantic 
efforts not to die? (Arlon, 1914.) What poet could tell 



138 WITH THREE ARMIES 

adequately of the pettiness of these monsters, who turned 
from butchery and violation to such trivialities as mixing 
a Belgian grocer's supplies of cloves and pepper with his 
flour, or filling his smoking tobacco with chunks of sweet 
butter? Who could sing the glory of the German medical 
congress that turned the most magnificent halls of the 
superb Palace of Justice in Brussels into vomitoriums and 
latrines? It would take a Homer himself to describe the 
burning of the church at Houtem-sous-Vilvorde on Sep- 
tember 13, 1914, while a crack regimental band executed 
the most fetching German music close by, outdoing even 
Nero's fiddling. 

There were cases, of course, where the destruction the 
Germans wrought was purely military in its reasons, and 
so not to be charged against them except as a result of 
their plan for world domination at whatever cost. But the 
destruction of those marvels of Louvain, the Hotel de 
Ville — more a gem of Flemish Gothic sculpture than of 
architecture, so covered was every foot of it with delicate 
carving — and the University with its priceless library, was 
cold-blooded savagery for which no reason existed. 

Where can I stop the tragic story — where is the end? 
To quote an embittered Englishman who loves the Belgium 
he knew and fears for the lovely old cities like exquisite 
Bruges of the Belfry: "We know the Beast now and the 
nature of him. If he have his way, he will make an end of 
Bruges before he loose his claws. With his devilish chem- 
istry of fire and explosion, he will utterly destroy all that 



THE BEAVEST AEE THE BELGIANS 139 

beautiful old history of ancient halls and noble houses, of 
bridges and towns and gates. ... He has made his 
filthy lodging in the good old houses . . . and never were 
there such days in Bruges, even when the anger of the 
Emperors was hot against the citizens. ... I think of 
what he has wrought in those French towns from which 
the sullen beast has been driven out, and I fear for the 
last peril."* 

We shall need to fear, unless we tell the Hun in clear 
Anglo-Saxon that we will pay him in his own coin, city 
for city, when we win. We shall not need to destroy the 
romantic old German towns so famous in picture and 
story. But his Essens, his Potsdams, his gaudy, flaring, 
nouveau riche towns where all the sordid materialism of 
the creature puffs itself large ; these, if burned and leveled 
flat, would hurt his pride and chastise his spirit. 

One evening at dinner my Captain-Doctor told with 
relish of his latest experience with an air raider. As he 
was going home, a bomb burst in the street he had just 
turned out of, and the concussion threw him ten feet. He 
jumped up and ran toward his house. As he reached it, a 
bomb fell at the other end of his own block, and again he. 
was knocked down. While he was struggling to get his key 
into the door, by this time quite ready to plunge into his 
cellar, a third bomb fell squarely in his back yard — and 
failed to explode. 



♦London, England, Evening News, October 6, 1917. 



140 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

"Nex' morning/' he laughed, in his queer, twisted Eng- 
lish, " I went out in de back yard to look. Zat son of a gun 
of a bum, 'e was lyin' in a hole in ze pavement. I was so 
dam' glad 'e didn' go off, I didn' know w'at to do. You 
know w'at I did ? I lean over him an' I make ze sign of ze 
Cross — so!" illustrating. "An' I say to 'im, 'You cam/ go 
off now, you son of a gun !' Zen I curse de ho die zat drop 
it, like zis!" and he gave a fluent anathema in Flemish 
which seemed comprehensive and soul-satisfying for even 
a man who had had such a narrow escape. 

His experience was only one of many illustrations of the 
uselessness of the aeroplane in war, except when employed 
as a scout, photograph, artillery-spotting, or general recon- 
naissance machine. To be effective for frightfulness, it 
would have to be used in such large fleets that the very 
number of the machines would render the attack vulner- 
able to the anti-aircraft guns; singly, it is negligible and 
tremendously costly. That it is the most spectacular and 
thrilling single feature of modern warfare no one who has 
seen an air fight can deny. 

One such fight I saw, a mad, impossible, swirling tumble 
in the clouds between an Ally machine, one of the latest 
types, a veritable hornet of the air, and four large bo die 
planes, with British, Belgian and German anti-aircraft 
guns all taking pot-shots at intervals. Around the flyers 
burst the shrapnel in puffy white and gray clouds, the 
wicked purr of their own machine-guns plajdng an insolent 
obbligato to the bigger guns' throaty music. One, two, 



THE BBAVEST AEE THE BELGIANS 141 

three of the Germans dropped plummet-like, or fluttered 
down like twisted leaves. And presently the Ally and the 
surviving loche spiraled almost straight up at frightful 
speed and angles, dueling to the death. We did not see 
what happened above the cloud of vapor into which they 
disappeared at perhaps a mile and a half. Both guns still 
spat steel and fire. And then one gun stopped. Only the 
slower put-put-put! of the German went on, stopped, spat 
again, and stopped for good. Down through the dank 
cloud came the Ally machine, tumbling over and over, with 
bent wings and no guiding hand. The German battery 
opposite took a final and successful round at it, and it 
dropped like a stone inside their lines. Was it Captain 
Guynemer we had seen fall? He was shot down that day 
near that spot, in a similar fight. . . . 

Near Furnes, close enough to the front lines even yet 
to catch an occasional shell, stands the hut and social serv- 
ice station known as the Canal Boat Mission, over which 
presides a Canadian lady who regards the flying loche with 
scant respect, though she has suffered more than once from 
his attentions. For three years Mrs. Inness-Taylor has 
somehow managed to keep the Mission stocked with Amer- 
ican and British foods, groceries, canned things of all sorts, 
soap, clothing, books, everything imaginable that a people 
in distress could need. With her own war-roughened hands 
she has dressed the wounds and sores of more than two 
thousand Belgians — and lost part of a finger through in- 
fection ; with her own hands she helped to feed during two 



142 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

school years the six hundred children who dared to attend 
school in the low, carefully camoufles buildings across the 
road from her hut. With her own hands she answered the 
plea of a refugee who came up while we were talking, and 
begged for a shirt. I asked her if she were not worn out ; 
if she would not welcome the opportunity to go home for 
a rest. Her Spartan reply shamed me. 

"Go home? While there are more Belgians to be 
helped? Oh!" 

She did not talk well — of herself. Only by cautious 
questioning, with Major L prompting her at every halt- 
ing sentence, did I learn of her long service and of the 
horrors she had gone through. Not long before, when 
talking with her assistant, a Scotch lady, in the very door 
where we now stood, a German aviator dropped a bomb 
one of whose flying shards slashed her companion in two, 
and deluged Mrs. Inness-Taylor herself with the warm 
blood. Still with the Major prompting, I learned of her 
tiny dugout in the back yard, only a step from her door, 
and persuaded her to show me that inadequate shelter. 

"It is all right for shrapnel," she said without a quaver 
in her strong, womanly voice, "but I imagine if I am ever 
down here when a shell falls, I shall certainly 'go west/ " 

As I came away, she showed me her store of condensed 
milk, and told with tears in her voice of the gratitude of 
the aged men and women and the babies it was keeping 
alive. 

"When you go back," she pleaded, "do tell America that 



'' r ilpte: 




Her Majesty the Queen of the Belgians 




Mrs. Inness-Taylor 



THE BEAVEST AEE THE BELGIANS 143 

we want more milk all the time. It is all that is keeping 
many of these poor children and old people, too feeble to 
work, and too poor to get away, from dying of actual star- 
vation. American milk is the best we have, yon have only 
to ship it to the Belgian Canal Boat Mission, in care of the 
British Admiralty in London, and we shall get every 
precious drop." 

Mrs. Inness-Taylor is not the only woman doing noble, 
heroic, self-sacrificing duty on that dreary Belgian front. 
Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians is doing a wonderful work 
in her field — all the more wonderful when one considers 
her German nativity. Born a Bavarian Princess, she has 
had to endure not only the horrors that the others have wit- 
nessed, but the further horror, spared to the Belgian and 
French and English women, of knowing that it is her own 
blood kin, which has crucified, is still crucifying the people 
of whom she is the official head and mother. 

And how magnificently she has served Belgium through- 
out its black hours ! No Queen before in the history of 
mankind has so fully measured up to the loftiest ideals of 
womanhood: heartening her royal husband; cheering the 
men in the trenches; succoring the sick and starved, the 
wounded and dying. And when, in those memorable days 
of 1914, that pitiful stream of refugee children was driven 
like spray before the German wave, some of them orphaned, 
some of them hysterical with the horror of what they had 
witnessed, some of them mutilated, and all of them fright- 
ened, hungry and hopeless, more like a pack of starved 



144 WITH THREE ARMIES 

wolf cubs than like human children, the great Queen opened 
wide her mother's heart and took them into it. She fed 
their empty stomachs ; she nursed their neglected wounds ; 
she soothed and healed the broken, trembling hearts, to the 
last dirty, shivering, homeless urchin of them all. 

To-day Elizabeth of Belgium wears no royal crown. She 
wears a more precious diadem, the blazing Red Cross of 
mercy; wears it royally, wears it with all the glory and 
modesty of majestic womanhood, worthy as any Belgian 
born of Caesar's "liorum omnium fortissi sunt belgae!" 



CHAPTBE X 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE GERMAN ATROCITIES 

When" the first reports of German atrocities committed 
in Belgium and France reached the United States they 
were discredited as soon as heard. Itfo civilized human be- 
ing could believe that other humans professing the same 
general scheme of civilization could possibly be guilty of 
crimes at once so revolting and so apparently useless. But 
evidence kept piling up. Fresh allegations appeared every 
day in the press. The testimony of reputable eye-witnesses 
gave solidity to the reportorial accounts. And presently 
the Governments of Belgium, France and England issued 
official statements of sworn evidence. At last, we had to 
believe — did believe, unless possessed of a consciousness 
either ignorant, undeveloped, or wilfully blind. 

To such specimens it can only be said that everything 
they have read in their newspapers as to the atrocities com- 
mitted upon wounded soldiers and sailors, upon civilians 
of both sexes and all ages — even upon the babies ! — are 
only a tithe of the truth. The whole truth is too sicken- 
ing, too absolutely revolting, to be told. 

Yet even when most of us did believe, the hideous thing 
was utterly beyond our comprehension. What did it mean ? 
What was the psychology back of it ? How was it humanly 

145 



146 WITH THREE ARMIES 

possible that the people who produced a Luther and a 
Reformation ; who gave to the world a Mozart, a Beethoven, 
a Kant; a people who have long been known as a home- 
loving, affectionate, sensible and industrious folk — how 
could this people possibly disembowel babies and crucify 
women who had previously been raped into raving insan- 
ity.* Such a people could not. But the Germany of Luther, 
of the Reformation, of the kindlier spirits, is dead. The 
soul has been ironed out of it by the neo-Metzschian philos- 
ophy of Prussian militarism. One need only turn with eyes 
opened and intellect sharpened by the war, to the history, 
literary as well as political, of the German people, to under- 
stand. The list of German thinkers and writers who have 
preached discord, inhumanity, treachery, brutality, fright- 
fulness, hatred, world-domination at whatever cost, in- 
cludes some surprising names. 

Frederick the Great made an excellent beginning with 
his arrogant epigram, "Never form alliances except to breed 
hatred." His contemptuous reference to the Marechal de 
Soubise — "He has twenty cooks and not one spy. I have 
twenty spies and not one cook" — was as scathing a self- 
indictment as it was bitter a jest. 

The moderns have followed that eighteenth-century cue 
so closely they have overrun it. The long roll may be 
headed by the mad philosopher Nietzsche, the historian 
von Treitschke, the military critic von Bernhardi, and 



*Proofs of this statement, both verbal and documentary, are 
at the disposal of serious investigators. 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATKOCITIES 147 

their like, exponents who carried their propaganda of ruth- 
lessness to the Nth degree with an effrontery as unblush- 
ing as their premises were false and their arguments im- 
possible. Line by line, their own utterances convict them : 
Nietzsche, for example, in Beyond Good and Evil, when 
he says : "We hold that hardness, violence, slavery, danger 
in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, arts of 
temptation and deviltry of all kinds; that everything evil, 
terrible, tyrannical, wild-beastlike, and serpentlike in man 
contributes to the elevation of the species just as much as 
its opposite — and in saying this, we do not even say 
enough." 

Von Treitschke says the Germans let primitive tribes 
"decide whether they should be put to the sword, or thor- 
oughly Germanized. Cruel as these processes of trans- 
formation may be, they are a blessing to humanity. It 
makes for health that the nobler race should absorb the 
inferior stock." General von Bernhardi lamented the hu- 
manity of Europe in the ominous statement: "There is a 
tendency, as vain as it is erroneous, to wish to neglect the 
brutal element in war," while General von Hartmann 
insists that modern war demands "far more brutality, far 
more violence, than was formerly the case," and in another 
place declares "the term 'civilized warfare' . . . seems 
hardly intelligible ... it carries in itself a plain con- 
tradiction." 

The utterances of the poets and musicians, lovers of 
beauty and nominally apostles of learning and culture, 



PROCLAMATION 

The Tribunal of the Imperial German Council of "War, 
sitting in Brussels, has pronounced the following sentences : 

Condemned to Death for conspiring together to commit 
Treason : — 

Edith Cavell, Teacher, of Brussels. 
Philippe Bancq, Architect, of Brussels. 
Jeanne de Belleville, of Montignies. 
Louise Thuiliez, Professor at Lille. 
Louis Severin, Chemist, of Brussels. 
Albert Libiez, Lawyer, of Mons. 

For the same offence the following have been condemned 
to 15 years' hard labour: — 

Hermann Capiau, Engineer, of Wasmes. 
Ada Bodart, of Brussels. 
Georges Derveau, Chemist, of Paturages. 
Marv de Croy, of Bellignies. 

At the same sitting, the War Council condemned IT 
others charged with treason against the Imperial Armies 
to sentences of penal servitude and imprisonment varying 
from two to eight years. 

The sentences passed on Bancq and Edith Cavell have 
already been fully executed. 

The Governor-General of Brussels brings these facts to 
the knowledge of the Public that they may serve as a 
warning. The Governor of the City, 

General von Bissing. 

Brussels, 12th October, 1915. 



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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 4TR0CITIES 149 

prove that these men, while not so bloodthirsty as their less 
artistic brethren, were quite as fully impregnated with the 
national self-sufficiency and self-consciousness, and lusted 
after world domination. Yes, the soul has been ironed out 
of the old Germany. The Germany of to-day is a huge 
mechanical abortion, neither so perfect that it can not be 
destroyed, nor so imperfect that we can permit it to go on 
being perfected, and thus eventually becoming powerful 
enough to fulfil its proclaimed destiny of overpowering the 
whole world. 

Incredible though it be, the Germans themselves do not 
deny the atrocities; rather, they glory in them. General 
von Disfurth says: "We do not have to justify ourselves. 
Whatever our soldiers do to hurt the enemy, we accept in 
advance." Omitting the most hideous and nauseating in- 
fractions of the generally accepted modern code of warfare, 
consider this list — 

The shooting, by squads of riflemen and by machine- 
guns, singly and en masse, of civilians and soldiers, without 
regard to age, sex, occupation or momentary activities; 
butchery, by order, of wounded on the field of battle ; rape, 
with little children sometimes among the victims; mutila- 
tions, of women, children, civilian males, prisoners of war, 
the wounded, and, most despicable of all, the dead ; the use 
of non-combatants as a screen for German troops in action; 
the deportation of whole populations ; enforced labor under 
fire; the importation of prostitutes into France and Bel- 
gium to act as spies; the systematized official introduction 



150 WITH THREE ARMIES 

of "white slavery" — the victims being Belgian and French 
women — in the Ardennes, for "the pleasure and benefit of 
the Imperial German troops" ; the poisoning of wells ; the 
distribution of poisoned candy, food, medical and surgical 
supplies; the dissemination of poisoned propaganda bal- 
loons; the defilement of houses, palaces, public buildings, 
religious institutions and churches ; looting by official war- 
rant, often under official supervision; the unnecessary de- 
struction of the Ardennes and other forests; the blowing 
up of roads, river and canal banks and waterworks; the 
annihilation of entire towns; the cutting down or ruining 
of fruit and shade trees, vines, shrubs, etc. 

While the Great General Staff accepted all this "in ad- 
vance," the German people accepted it quite as cheerfully 
afterward, as innumerable German newspapers,* books and 
pamphlets published since the beginning of the war show. 
The one which touches us most intimately is a pamphlet 
by Pastor D. Baumgarten, of Berlin, in which he says, in 
the course of an amazing discourse upon the" Sermon on 
the Mount: "Whoever can not prevail upon himself to 
approve from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the 
Lusitania — whoever can not conquer his sense of the gi- 
gantic cruelty to unnumbered perfectly innocent victims 
. . . and give himself up to honest delight at this vic- 
torious exploit of German defensive power — him we judge 
to be no true German." 



*I have photographic copies of such newspapers, giving de- 
tailed accounts of some of the crimes indicated. 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATROCITIES 151 

It is only fair to state that, at the beginning of the war, 
some of the German soldiers were not able to look on or 
take part in the frightful excesses without feeling the dumb 
stirrings of that human conscience which all the biological 
arguments of militaristic Germany had not been able en- 
tirely to stifle. Consider some soldiers 5 diaries on this 
score : 

Gefreiter Paul Spielmann, I Kompanie, Ersatz-Batail- 
lon, I Garde-Infanterie-Brigade, wrote of a night-alarm on 
September 1, 1914, near Blamont: "Die Einwohner sind 
gefliichtet im Dorf. Da sa es gr'dulicli aus. Das Blut glebt 
an alle Dante, und was man fur Gesichter, gr'dsslich sa alles 
aus. Es imrde sofort samiliche Tote, die Zahl 60, sofort 
beerdigt. Fiele alte Frauen, Vater, und eine Frau, welclie 
in Entbindung stand, grauenhaft alles manzusehen," etc. 
"The inhabitants fled through the town. It was horrible. 
Blood was plastered on all the houses, and as for the faces 
of the dead, they were hideous. They were buried all at 
once, some sixty of them, including many old women and 
fathers, and one woman about to be delivered." 

This first-class soldier had not reached that altitude of 
Teutonism of which Dr. Gefrorrer speaks in the line: 
"Frenchmen or Slavs are accessible to moments of pity; 
the German never or rarely." But the war was young in 
1914, and doubtless Gefreiter Paul progressed to the entire 
satisfaction of the General Staff. 

One other weakling, Private Hassemer, of the VXIItH 
Corps, entered in his diary ; 



152 WITH THREE AEMIES 

"3.9.14. Sommepy, Marne. A frightful bloodbath. Vil- 
lage burnt to the ground, the French thrown into the burn- 
ing houses. Civilians and all burnt up together/' or, in the 
original German text: "Em schrecJcliches Blutlad, Dorf 
ajbgebrcunrd, die Franzosen in die Irenmnden H'duser ge- 
worfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbranM" 

An unsigned diary of an officer of the 178th Saxons re- 
grets some of the wild butcheries in the Belgian Ardennes 
in late August and September, but a little later a change 
comes over the rapidly hardening soul of this gallant sol- 
dier, and he notes without comment that "a scout from 
Marburg, having placed three women one behind the other, 
brought them all down with one shot." 

Economical scout! Did he receive the Iron Cross for 
this saving of ammunition ? 

Considering the fact as established, we are now most inter- 
ested in knowing exactly why such crimes were, are still (on 
or about December twenty-fifth — mark the date ! — an Amer- 
ican soldier was found by his comrades after the Germans 
had retreated, with his throat cut), and will go on being com- 
mitted. What is the psychology behind the actual deeds 
themselves? Do the Germans commit their atrocities as a 
result of the mob spirit which we Americans understand 
only too well; in the mad heat of battle; when inflamed 
by either alcohol or resistance? Or do they commit them 
because of individual degeneracy? No doubt, in so vast a 
body as the German Army, all the causes suggested at one 
time or another, developed atrocities. That is unfortu- 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATROCITIES 153 

nately true in every army in war times, our own included. 
With the German Army, however, very little is fortuitous. 
The appalling fact is that by far the larger and often the 
most cruel atrocities in Belgium and France were com- 
mitted under direct orders. 

An order of Major-General Stenger to the men of the 
LVIIIth Brigade, composed of the 112th and 142d In- 
fantry Regiments, at Thiaville, Meurthe-et-Moselle, on the 
afternoon of August 26, 1914, reads : "Von heute abwerden 
Tceine Gefangene mehr gemacht. Samtliche Gefangene 
werden nieder gemacht. Verwundete oh mit Waffen oder 
Wehrlos nieder gemacht. Gefangene auch in grosseren 6 
geschlossenen Formationen werden nieder gemacht. Es 
hleibe Tcein Feind leoend hinter uns." In English: "After 
to-day no more prisoners are to be taken. All prisoners are 
to be killed. The wounded, with or without arms, are to 
be killed. Prisoners even in convoys of six or more, are to 
be killed. No living enemy shall be left behind us." 

Private Moritz Grosse, 177th Infantry, at Dinant, scrib- 
bled in his diary: "Throwing of bombs into the houses. 
In the evening, military chorale, Nun danket alle Gott 
(Now all thank God)." Private Paul Glode, of the 9th 
Battalion, Pioneers, IXth Corps, ends one page of his 
diary with the line : "Verstummelungen der Verwundeten 
sind an Tagesordnung- — Mutilation of the wounded is the 
order of the day." 

Only degenerates could issue such orders; only degener- 
ates could carry out such orders, not only in the letter, but 



154 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

in the spirit as well. The natural and obvious objection, 
that a whole nation of degenerates is a moral impossibility, 
is easily controverted. 

Eor more than a century the ruling classes of Germany 
have been mesmerizing themselves with the belief which 
Eichte voiced so clearly when he said: "Germans . . . 
it is you who, of all the modern nations, have received in 
quantity the germs of human perfection; and it is to you 
that the premier role has been given in its development. 
If you succumb, humanity will perish with you." The first 
step in carrying out that "premier role in its development" 
was taken by Frederick the Great in 1763, when Eichte 
was only a year old. The Emperor, finding his peasants too 
stupid to make soldiers, decreed education, of a sort, and 
just enough, to fit them for military training. 

Thenceforward the educational system developed, now 
under the spur of a Eichte's philosophic imagination, now 
given new fire by a poet's dream that "the whole world 
must be German" (Heinrich Heine), until it resolved itself 
into an almost military system apart from soldier. Obedi- 
ence, respect for authority and the word issued by author- 
ity, patient, industrious thoroughness, and a practical de- 
nial of the individual's right to originality, made it very 
largely a repressive system, whose result has been that the 
masses never lose their subservience to any superior. This 
lack of right to originality may be denied fiercely, since 
We Americans have always had a mistaken idea of German 
education. We supposed naturally that because scientific 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OP ATBOCITIES 155 

specialization and encouragement of a free spirit of re- 
search in technical and scientific work characterized the 
German universities, the same thing applied throughout 
the whole educational system. It does not. The lower 
schools start the youngster right — right, that is, accord- 
ing to the German notion — and when he moves on to the 
higher grades (comparatively few do), he grows naturally 
in the rut where he was started. 

It is a system which has proved, in the hands of unscru- 
pulous authority, a philosopher's stone of sorts. By using 
it adroitly, it has been possible to transmute human beings 
into the mechanical parts of an Army, which in its turn is 
merely the physical manifestation of the German meta- 
physics. These mechanical creatures or new beings, when 
not actually in military service, look, talk, behave generally 
like human beings; and so they deceived the world. But 
they are not human. They are the veritable "blond beast'* 
of Nietzsche, "rejoicing monsters, who perhaps go on their 
way, after a hideous sequence of murder, conflagration, 
violation, torture, with as much gaiety and equanimity as 
if they had merely taken part in some student gambols." 
Love, sympathy, mercy, the power of individual thought 
and reason, are foreign to them. The natural, or rather, 
the primitive, instincts govern them. Their inhibitory 
centers are so blunted and dulled by the schooling they 
have had that ordinary conventions no longer apply to 
them in even so small a thing as courtesy. 

A very important, if not a vital part of this newer Ger- 



156 WITH THREE ARMIES 

man philosophy, is the doctrine, based on biology by many 
of the foremost of Germany's intellectuals, that the essence 
of life is conflict. The Darwinian idea, developed to suit 
the greedy ambitions of Germany, and warped without re- 
gard to modern conditions, is the basis of the new theses. 
Briefly, these ideas are that natural law must inevitably 
work out in the survival of the fittest among twentieth- 
century humanity, as it has always done among the brutes. 
By this ruthless means only the best of hnmanity is per- 
mitted to endure, and this evolution assures the salvation 
of society. Germany, according to this ingenious argument, 
takes the place, for mankind, of the rigors of winter and 
summer, lack of food and water, powerful enemies and 
sickness that certainly, to a greater or less degree, weed out 
the weaklings from among the birds and animals. 

The German philosophy considers the German mind, the 
German body, the German system of life and of govern- 
ment, so far the best in existence that there is no com- 
petitor; hence it must necessarily overcome all others and 
rnle, harshly, nntil mankind realizes its benefits and yields 
to it. With characteristic modesty, the Germans endorse 
fully Professor von Seyden's declaration that "the Germans 
are the chosen people of the world. Their destiny is to 
govern the world and to direct the other nations for the 
good of humanity," and the similar utterances of Maxi- 
milian Harden, the editor of Die Zukunft, who wrote in 
September, 1901, that it is "clearly the sense of history 
that the white race, under the conduct of the Germans, 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATROCITIES 157 

arrives now at the real and definitive domination of the 
world;" and again, "the hour now sounds when Germany 
must take its place of power, directing the whole world." 
Germany has been so thoroughly drilled in this for years 
that almost every one believes it as implicitly as he believes 
in the difference between daylight and darkness. It is not 
a matter for argument; it admits of no real debate; it is 
the fundamental fact of the modern universe. 

It is this very honesty of their self-deceit that makes the 
Germans so dangerous. Their faith in a world-absorbing 
destiny for Germany is the blind notion of children who 
cry peevishly, "We want to become a world people ! Let us 
remind ourselves that the belief in our mission as a world- 
people has arisen from our originally purely spiritual (my 
italics) impulse to absorb the world into ourselves." (Prof. 
F. Meinecke.) That "spiritual" impulse so evident for the 
past three years is a favorite doctrine of the German clergy, 
and we find the Herr Pastor Lehmann indulging himself 
in such genial religious camouflage as "It is enough for us 
to be a part of God," and "the German soul is God's soul : it 
shall and will rule over mankind." Dr. Preuss rises to no- 
ble heights of inspiration with his "He (God) has by His 
hidden intent designated the German people to be His (the 
Messiah's) successor." Pastor J. Rump's outcry that the 
Entente Allies righting Germany are a "Jesusless horde, a 
crowd of the Godless" whom he fears because "our defeat 
would mean the defeat of His Son in humanity," is almost 
as emetic as his other cry-— -"We are fighting for the cause 



158 WITH THEEB AEMIES 

of Jesus within mankind !" It is Dr. Preuss, however, who 
touches the uttermost height of this blasphemous idealiza- 
tion of Germany with the lines : "God has in Luther prac- 
tically chosen the German people, and that can never he 
altered, for is it not written in Eoman xi : 29, 'For the gifts 
and calling of God are without repentance' ?" He explains 
modestly that the Germans necessarily have not fully mer- 
ited this calling and election : "it proceeds from the sheer 
grace of God, so we can maintain it without any Pharisaism 
whatever/' 

Can or need anything more be said ? Surely I have pre- 
sented evidence enough to any doubting Thomas to prove 
that the committing of atrocities by the Army and Navy, 
and the acceptance and glorification of them by the German 
people is the logical progression of their development in 
degeneracy under the tutelage of their megalomaniacs: 
critics, philosophers, clergy, historians, professional sol- 
diers, and the ruler who holds his powers by Divine right 
— we have his own word for it. 

And the psychology back of it all is the false German phi- 
losophy of life, a psychology of madness, that carries — let 
us hope — its own cure of complete self-destruction. 



CHAPTEE XI 



HATE 



When the incredible reports of the German villainies 
were well authenticated, there cropped out simultaneously 
an amazing rumor. France, we were told, actually did not 
hate Germany for what she was doing. It was superhuman 
— impossible ! We could not believe that the French, fiery 
by nature, volatile and temperamental as we had known 
them to be, could go on righting in the old spirit that had 
always characterized them in warfare — from the days when 
that great French knight and gentleman stepped out before 
his Army and bowed to his British foe with the courteous 
lequest: "Will you not do me the honor to fire first, sir?" 

The explanation lies in the unwillingness of the French- 
man to believe in the German's announced policy of fright- 
fulness, in his earnestly maintained conviction that the 
outrages of ten thousand kinds were simply part of the 
madness due to war itself : the sporadic madness, in a word, 
of the individual under the impulse of the greater madness. 
There is no doubt, too, that a chivalrous people can never 
fully credit the unchivalrous with their full measure of 
indecency. That spirit burned clear and unwavering 
through all the first three years of the combat. The 
Frenchman emphatically did not hate the German. 

159 



160 WITH THREE ARMIES 

And then came the heyday of hate, of Teutonic hate — 
and the Frenchman learned overnight to hate with a 
fierceness and profundity as fiery as his chivalry. Germany 
has with her own blundering, stupid, material efficiency 
raised a wall so thick and strong and high between herself 
and France that I believe no payment of indemnities, no 
re-establishment of friendly relations, no lapse of cen- 
turies even, will ever breach it and readmit Germany to the 
ancient basis of equal intercourse. Hatred is usually to be 
deprecated for its folly ; sometimes it is justified, as hatred 
for sin; but there are times, and this is one of them, when 
hatred — like Bret Harte's murder of the "Chinee" — is not 
only justifiable, but positively praiseworthy; and he would 
be a poor specimen of Frenchman who did not, from the 
very uttermost depths of his soul, hate the German for his 
atrocious bestiality, to-day, to-morrow, and forever; hate 
him with the hatred of loathing, of bitter contempt, with 
the conscious, righteous ire of an outraged superior who can 
not even think of the unclean creature without revulsion. 

I must not be understood by this panegyric of hate to 
mean that the Frenchman can ever, under any circum- 
stances, so far forget himself as to ordain a regime of like 
viciousness. France could not be guilty of that and remain 
France. So her hatred is tinged with bitterness by the 
knowledge that Germany deliberately trusted to an honor 
she herself was far from possessing, and worked her diabo- 
lisms secure in the certainty that she would not be required 
to pay in kind. 



HATE 161 

It is unlikely even that individuals will wreak any great 
amount of personal vengeance. I picked up a lone French 
Sergeant one day on the Grands Boulevards, and gave him 
luncheon. — The whole war is right here on those Paris 
Boulevards. A sympathetic ear, a few invitations to lunch- 
eon, a few adroit, tactful questions, and one could build 
up the story complete: every atrocity, every plan, every 
success and defeat — and every man's own hopes and fears 
and dreams. — We talked of the duration of the war, and 
the Sergeant shrugged. He did not know, nor did he seem 
especially to care, how long the struggle would continue. 
I was mildly surprised, since all France is weary and heart- 
sick. Then he added: "If it goes on another year and a 
half, we shall get across the Rhine, now that you Amer- 
icans are here to help us." He hesitated a moment, his blunt 
peasant face working with emotion that finally refused to 
be suppressed. "And when we do cross the border — God 
protect Germany!" 

Masking my astonislnnent, I inquired casually : "Why ? 
Will you pay off some old scores ?" 

He leaned forward, pointed knife and fork straight at 
me, transfixed me with his bayonet eyes. "Me void, mon 
ami! I have nothing left. When the bodies retreated from 
my district, my wife was about to be confined. Two of 
them attacked her. My seventy-two-year-old mother inter- 
fered. They used both women; both died in their hands. 
Then they blew up my house, obliterated my garden, my 
town. I am mad when I think of it. Can I withhold my 



163 WITH THEEB ARMIES 

men when we cross the border? Suppose they want to do 
the same things — can I say no, with my eyes still seeing 
what I have seen?" 

He can not — out Tie will! When that day comes, if he 
sees a German woman struggling in the grip of one of his 
own men, he will spring at the poilu like a tiger. The spirit 
that again and again has threatened dire vengeance and 
mutilation to Germans, and then fed them instead, not- 
withstanding the heat of action and the elation of capture, 
will not — in the large — permit the escutcheon of Erance 
to be stained. 

To come back to the issue — what was it roused Erance to 
a true appreciation of the German spirit ? It was the Dev- 
astated Region — formless, nameless, unnameable — the visi- 
ble manifestation of everything heartless, bestial, obscene — ■ 
the essence of German Kultur. Never before seeing that 
stricken district had I realized how close to his mother 
Earth a man can be. I found myself bound to her gaping 
wounds by the rusted, tangled barbed wire, my own heart 
torn in sympathy with hers. I knew, too, that the frontiers 
of to-day are no longer black lines on a green map, no 
longer hypothetical divisions for commercial purposes. 
They are red streams on a groaning, encumbered earth. 
And to-morrow there will be no frontiers at all — for to- 
morrow there will be nothing but civilization. 

My visit to the Devastated Region was made on the 
strength of a courteous note — "Le Grand Quartier General 
a accorde voire voyage de region de Noyon pour mardi" 



HATE 163 

etc. There were six of us in the party, four Americans, a 
French Aumonier, or Chaplain — twice decorated for hero- 
ism under fire — and a Spanish Canon of the Cathedral of 
Cadiz, acting as correspondent for the clerical newspaper 
of his city. Our Staff Captain had his hands full to keep 
us reasonably bunched and fairly near our schedule; for 
some one of the party was invariably seized with the im- 
pulse to dart off to one side to see something else just at 
the moment when all the rest had finished and were start- 
ing toward the motors. By miracles of tact and courtesy 
he succeeded better, I imagine, than he had anticipated. 
Certainly our dossiers — the little booklets kept by the 
Foreign Office to show exactly how each one behaved on his 
various trips, and filed away for reference, so that a man 
who proved undesirable could be politely excluded from 
France in the future if such a course seemed wise or essen- 
tial — recorded no very dreadful misconduct, since we all 
had opportunities later on to visit other regions. 

The train carried us from the cavernous Gare du Nbrd 
to Compiegne, where the motors picked us up and sped us 
first to Eibecourt, through a lovely rolling country all 
gashed and ridged yet with trenches, both French and Ger- 
man, guarded by huge tangles of barbed wire overgrown 
with "foolish herbs" — the name the poetic French give 
plain weeds. 

Eibecourt was not an important town in its prime. 
To-day its poor houses have the air of having been poign- 
arded treacherously in the back, their faces smashed in 



164 WITH THEEE ABMIES 

afterward by an assassin as brutal as he was cowardly. 
When I think back to that sunny afternoon, how the racial 
characteristics of our little party stand out! — the Amer- 
icans unashamedly profane; the Aumonier volubly dis- 
tressed; Canon Cadiz a sphinx! What he thought I never 
knew; but I see him always a figure all dull black, with 
mute hands upraised in horror. 

To the Aumonier it was a doubly painful spectacle, be- 
cause here the pilgrims coming down from Belgium to 
Lourdes used to stop for refreshment and prayer. In a few 
graphic words he sketched us the scenes : the long train 
stopping, the pilgrims in their Sunday best before the 
altars in the hospital cars and outside along the track, 
chanting their prayers to the obbligato of the sweet-voiced 
larks; the townsfolk coming up with gracious little offer- 
ings of food and drink and good wishes to these seekers 
after hope and health. The last pilgrimage was in June of 
1914. Barely two months afterward the nurses who always 
accompanied the train were gathered at Louvain, not to 
aid the sick, but to succor the victims; and the hospital 
cars were in a bloodier service along the banks of the Yser. 
And now, not even a lark sings matins in Ribecourt — the 
ho die shot them all. 

If I could only give the picture that gentle, kindly old 
priest gave of those German soldiers humorously picking 
off the larks — ! Or if he had preached to France — a new 
Peter Hermit in a new crusade — with half the fire he 
poured out for us, the Army would have bivouacked on 




A shell-crater. The hole measures about two hundred and twenty-five 

feet in circumference, more than sixty feet in diameter 

and about twenty-five feet deep 




What the German does not demolish he makes useless, 
parts of machinery thrown into a ditch 



Essential 




Photographed by Harris Dickson, Esquire 

Mr. Riggs in the captured German trench at Ribecourt that runs 

under and through the church and graveyard. At this 

point the trench is about ten feet deep 




A French cemetery where the Hun has amused himself by tearing 
down and defiling figures of the Crucified Christ, 
and desecrating graves 



HATE 165 

Unter den Linden before this ! Yet he was an Aumonier, 
sacerdotal dispenser of alms, of the sacred things, purveyor 
of Spirit to the Regiment. He was the type of man one 
can go to with troubles : rotund, ruddy, wholly human, his 
hair all on his chin in a splendid gray beard instead of on 
his bald pate, where a deep, ragged dent told of the shrap- 
nel wound he would explain only by the single word, 
"Touched !" As we left the train at Compiegne he darted 
over to the cafe, the long black skirts of his soutane stream- 
ing out behind, and returned panting with a box of candy 
"for my good children wherever we find them." He made 
quite a joke out of giving us each a single piece to taste, 
and no more; for sweets are precious to the fighting man. 
His pockets were like a boy's, full of bits of string, a knife, 
matches, cigarettes for his "children," crumpled letters, 
and a curious little leather bag fastened with a snap. In it 
was an ugly, almost square bit of "scgTiahp-nell" which he 
said, with twinkling eyes, he had carried "three months in 
my shoulder — two years in my pocket. They gave me this 
for it !" he added, unconscious as a child, patting affection- 
ately the bronze Croix de Guerre beside the star of the 
wounded on his broad chest. But how did he get it ? "Oh, 
la, la! It was nothing, nothing at all! Merely helping a 
wounded a little l" 

At Dreslincourt, a few hundred meters farther along, 
there were houses completely battered to pieces and others 
right beside them spared, one would think, by miracle — ■ 
until one understands that they were used by German 



166 .WITH THREE ARMIES 

officers until the last moment, when there was no time to 
ruin them in the haste of retreat. A sunken dirt road 
wanders across the pleasant fields to a maze of German 
trenches and tremendous, concrete dugouts with roofs rein- 
forced by steel. Before them the road, camoufle with nets 
and branches, was dappled with shade and sunshine that 
gave it a pleasant air not even the gas-alarm bell still 
hanging in its place could take away. But the dugouts 
themselves were dark, unwholesome, smelly places. What 
did they think about as they lay on their unclean straw in 
there, those vanished Germans who left behind them 
crumpled copies of the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Neue 
Freie Presse, broken bottles and tin cans? As they looked 
cautiously out over the smiling fields toward the French 
wire, did they think, did they reason and ponder as the men 
of the other Armies are doing in like conditions? What 
dreams did they dream — of conquest, of loot, of violence 
or of home ? Or did they merely browse like other animals ? 
After Dreslincourt, Chiry and Passel, came the begin- 
ning of that frightful spectacle of cut-off trees we were to 
see so much of in a few hours, the evidence everywhere of 
a destruction as carefully calculated, as coldly ferocious as 
it was absolutely thorough: the planned-in-advance anni- 
hilation of every source of riches, of even life itself for the 
soil ! Here miles of cement telegraph and power-transmis- 
sion poles had been dynamited, each on the same side, each 
at the same height above the ground, each felled in the 
one direction. What a sight these fallen symbols of the 



HATE 167 

god of the thunderbolt, each with its quaint, twisted, Chi- 
nese-dragonlike tails of useless wires ! Everything that had 
once stood erect lay flat — every bit of destruction pointed 
the finger of mute condemnation after the retreating 
vandals. 

The pillaged, violated graves of the blasted chateau at 
little Mont Eenaud fired us with a righteous wrath as fu- 
rious as it was helpless. The ancient family vault, contain- 
ing eleven sepulchers — nine of adults, two of children — 
had been blown open. The wood of the caskets had been 
smashed, the leaden coffins breached enough to permit in- 
famous hands to prowl inside and pull out part of the 
sacred dust. What ghoul even could find pleasure in dis- 
turbing the ashes of those long dead — and in defiling, in 
hideously outraging what was not worth stealing? It was 
incredible; more incredible still, that the two tiny caskets 
in their little niches above should have been pulled aside 
and left askew, but otherwise unharmed. — Champier Ceme- 
tery is another black blot on the dark German name, with 
its smashed tombstones, its violated graves, its funerary 
monuments recut into pretentious memorials of the odious 
dead who had helped before their deaths to do these things ! 

Noyon, the city where John Calvin once lived, was not 
by any means destroyed. It was not even uninhabitable, 
and the streets displayed a dolorous animation as we rolled 
through, with workmen patching up the traces of the 
furious fighting that had preceded the retreat, and forlorn- 
looking citizens her§ and there returned to tafe§ up life 



168 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

all over again. Calvin's house — hardly more than a small 
stone tenement — we found up a tiny side street near the 
main square, a street more a slit for air between the houses 
than a real passageway. The German had not laid so much 
as a finger upon that historic dwelling. "Why ? A Protes- 
tant Swiss periodical tried to answer by pointing out that 
the Protestant Germans no doubt remembered Germany 
would celebrate the fourth centenary of the Reformation 
in October. What could be more evident than their inten- 
tion to "notify Protestants the world over that what they 
regarded as sacred, they spared, even in the midst of their 
comprehensive rage/' In one of the lower rooms of the 
house a mason was mixing plaster of paris to repair some 
cracks in the ceiling, and in another a souvenir-maker was 
bending over his bench full of empty rifle cartridge-shells. 
They gave us a cheery good day when we entered, but be- 
yond that they were speechless, as good artisans should be. 
The Cathedral is less damaged than I expected: only the 
organ shows traces of the invader's sacrilegious hand — its 
pipes ravished to make shell-bands. 

When the French entered Noyon, every building in any 
condition at all was immediately put to some service. One 
house seemed absolutely untouched, but it was filled with a 
frightful odor. Everything was polluted — beds, tables, 
closets, garments, books in the library. Fortunately, it 
seemed, the damage was not irreparable, and the house- 
cleaning was instant. It made not a particle of difference 
— the stench remained. Powerful disinfectants were used 



HATE 169 

with lavish hand — no use ! From cellar to attic the enraged 
poilus disinfected — and hunted. At last they found that 
the water-tank, stowed away under the high pent-roof, 
had been used as a latrine, and the plumbing system 
throughout the entire house impregnated. Still, even that 
could be remedied. It was worth doing, for the house was 
too valuable to destroy. Before it could be done, the crown- 
ing infamy was discovered — a laboriously constructed sep- 
arate system of piping, conducting the essence of this mass 
of putrefaction to no less than twenty separate orifices in- 
side the walls, whence it dripped down to spread its con- 
cealed seeds of death. Nothing could be done. That per- 
fectly sound house had to be completely demolished as a 
menace to the public health. How the Germans must have 
relished such a kultural joke ! 

The city had its share of the deportations and abuses, 
even, as a French Colonel testified, to the issuing of requi- 
sitions for pretty girls. And a brutal Prussian, while the 
girls were being gathered, weeping and hysterical, for a 
fate they understood only too well, bellowed at one of them 
in the hearing of her friends: "What are you sniveling 
about? It is a signal honor to be able to serve a Prussian 
officer as his 'orderly' F 

The devastation is complete throughout the region be- 
tween Noyon and the high, rolling ground before St. Quen- 
tin, where the German lines held. Every well was poisoned, 
and wherever there is a tap, glaring red signs were visible : 
"Dangerous Water ! Do Not Drink !" Nor man nor beast 



170 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

at first could slake his thirst at these mocking founts ; and 
even in September the small white signs proclaiming "Eau 
Potable" seemed far apart. It is useless to enumerate any 
but the more impressively ruined towns we saw. There 
are others literally by the hundred in that broad area, torn 
and soiled and shamed by the German soldiery in stolid 
enjoyment of its orders. 

Chauny the silent runs the gamut from peace to war, 
with its hardly-touched faubourg or suburb, and its oblit- 
erated center. When their two-year tenure of the town was 
all but over, the Germans herded into the suburb everybody 
not destined to accompany them on the retreat — a wretched 
little company of the aged, the sick and infirm, the crip- 
pled, whom they stripped of everything, even to some of the 
clothing they had on. Then the whole place was looted, 
systematically, efficiently, and the town proper set on fire. 
Fifty of the renconcentres were killed in the process. As the 
Germans marched hurriedly away with their slaves and 
their plunder, and the stricken, whimpering cast-offs stood 
appalled in their quarter, the field guns in the distance took 
a last, vicious strafe at it that killed fifteen more of them. 
Slowly the flames died down. Chauny was not. 

We could read the piteous story as we passed slowly 
through. The destruction had none of the systematic 
thoroughness that had wiped out other towns. It was wild, 
chaotic, hasty in the extreme, the work of madmen hard- 
pressed for time and conscious of an enemy on their very 
heels. Houses stood split in two, one half gone, the other 



HATE 171 

intact. In one a bed stood on what was left of a floor, 
three legs on it, the other in the air, the tattered bedclothes 
flapping in the wind. Leaden gutters twisted into serpen- 
tine shapes writhed about shattered eaves. In the main square 
rose an unusually lofty wreck. Before March of 1917 it 
had been the Hotel de Yille, or Town Hall. E~ow it was 
recognizable chiefly by the Pompeiian red walls of its care- 
fully-labeled Salle de Gonseil, where a big white plaster 
bust of the Eepublic — the only thing left — calm]y surveyed 
the desolation below, totally unaware that its dignified 
Grecian nose was smoked perfectly black ! 

Near the edge of the town stood the ruin of a savings- 
bank and safe deposit. A low fragment of the f agade, and 
part of the sign, were left ; that was all. The steel girders 
holding up the floor and making the top of the safe deposit 
vault had been twisted by the explosion of a mine as one 
twists paper spills. Half-buried in the debris, one of the 
tiers of safe deposit boxes showed a melancholy, battered 
face. Every box had been jimmied open. "Whenever the 
Germans left a town the banks were systematically plun- 
dered, all the specie and negotiable paper sent to Germany ; 
all the private papers, such as wills, notes of hand, deeds, 
mortgages, etc., of no value for sale to the conquerors, were 
tossed out into the street and burned. How the tangle of 
personal property will be cleared up will depend entirely 
upon the good sense and charity of the persons involved, 
since most of the records have been destroyed. 

Just outside the town, on one of those roads camoufle 



172 WITH THREE ARMIES 

for miles by ugly strips of burlap strung between lofty 
poles, a factory had been blown up. What it had been I 
do not know, beyond the fact that it had had a lofty chim- 
ney and a vast amount of internal machinery. Now it 
looked more like a heap of giant's jackstraws than anything 
else, without form or shape. Farther along, another works 
of some sort stood outwardly intact — but every essential 
piece of its machinery had been removed and thrown into 
a little stream, to rust into uselessness and cripple the local 
industry. Perhaps it was cheaper and quicker to do that 
than to bring together enough explosives to demolish the 
whole structure. The methods varied with the exigencies 
of the place and moment, the policy and its results never. 

Erieres-Eaillouel is so completely gone one may stand at 
what used to be its outskirts and ask, "Where ?" 

Not far distant the mutilated plain is dominated by that 
amazing mound built by the soldiers for the amusement of 
the Kaiser's second son, fat Prinz Eitel-Friedrich : a little 
butte laboriously heaped up in perfect geometrical con- 
tours, moated by a regular wet fosse, crowned with a fine 
rustic summerhouse. Above the front entrance to this 
royal lodge was the inscription in German blackletter, 
"Hubertus-Haus" (St. Hubert's Lodge). What must the 
saintly patron of hunters think of Eitel-Fritz's hunt ? Big 
wooden toadstools served as seats, a cross-section of a giant 
pine, brought from some distant forest at enormous labor, 
as a table. I wondered the Prince had not sent back to 
Germany for the hideous little colored terra cotta gnomes 



HATE 173 

and trolls and other horrors with which Germans love to 
stud their fairest gardens — a choice example of this is to 
be seen in the suburbs of our own Pasadena ! 

Beer and scenery, swilled together in that belvedere of 
abomination ! A grand sweep of broad, rolling vale flanked 
by the tender shades of the living hills, at this distance un- 
marred by trace of cannon-scar or savage ax ; far off, quiv- 
ering in the sunshine under the immense blue vault, the twin 
spires of Laon and those of St. Quentin ; and somewhere be- 
low the horizon the City of Dreams, the coveted siren of the 
imagination, the German goal — Paris! The princely beer 
must have been sweet on such a spot, where the princely 
imagination had reared this tumulus after the fashion of 
his Hunnish forebears. Probably the princely siestas were 
sweet also. Von Treitschke says : "The Latin has no feel- 
ing for the beauty of a forest; when he takes his repose in 
it he lies upon his stomach, while we rest on our backs." 
Hoch der deutscher embonpoint! How could a German lie 
upon his stomach ? 

About the mound in the branches of fruit tree and 
mighty plane and sycamore bordering the highroad, bird 
voices mingled sweetly with Nun danhet alle Gott above the 
distant bruit of the guns until the days when that "trium- 
phant, strategic retreat" began with the swinging of the ax. 
Clear beyond the range of the eye German efficiency pro- 
ceeded methodically and unhurriedly to assassinate the 
orchards, where the buds were already formed and all but 
ready to burst for joy. 



174 WITH THREE AEMIES 

By squads and companies the axmen went forth in the 
dawning. When they returned at even to their beer and 
green sausage and military chorals, the little fruit trees 
that had made this halcyon vale a land of jellies and pre- 
serves and candied fruits, a fat, rich land sweet to the 
nostrils in spring as to the eye, lay in rows, bleeding mutely 
to death. Every tree was felled at the same height pre- 
cisely; every one was felled in the same direction. They 
lie there yet by the thousands and the scores of thousands. 
Along the road, the axmen were aided by lusty sawyers 
who worked with equal skill upon those stately, those proud 
and giant poplars and buttonwoods France had grown so 
lovingly these many years to shade her traveling children 
and their flocks. They, too, were felled all at the same 
height, all with their noble crowns pointed in the same 
direction. The inconceivable sadness of the scene moved 
the Eussian Prince Vladimir Ghika to muse upon it : "The 
uniformity of orientation, the universality in the destruc- 
tive measures, exactly executed, meticulously observed, in 
the middle of the ash-heap of annihilated villages, produces 
a strange impression as of a ritual. One feels himself an 
observer of the results of a terrific barbarian sacrifice to 
clear their conscience before some deity of death." 

Eitel Fritz did his worst. Nature, when he had gone, 
sent her kindly dews and vivifying rains upon the butch- 
ered innocents as they lay there in rows upon the sodden 
earth, and lo, by hundreds and by thousands they bloomed, 
spending their last atom of vitality to fill the eye with color 



HATE 175 

and the air with sweetness again, in vain but beautiful pro- 
test against the savagery that had laid them low. 

Jussy, that never was shelled, was razed house by house, 
tree by tree, until to-day nothing is left higher than a 
man's knees — save for the brickheap of the church — and 
many a house is only a bald spot in the tangle of ruin. For 
cold-blooded, elaborately-planned destruction, carried out 
with the ruthless, detailed care characteristic of German 
Staff plans, Jussy has no equal. 

More than two thousand inhabitants had made the town 
what any French town of like size is in a similarly fertile 
and productive district: one big family of neighbors with 
the same interests and hopes and occupations, contented 
with little, asking naught but the peace of a cheery old age 
among ancestral conditions and possessions. Germany de- 
nied them this. And not content with the destruction of 
trees and buildings, she uprooted and trampled every vine, 
every shrub, every living thing, blew up the soil itself, 
sowed mines under the roads and wherever men might wish 
to plow, dropped dead animals and ordure into the springs, 
smashed the bridge across the river, and filled the stream 
itself with machinery and agricultural implements not 
otherwise made useless. Before the work was completed the 
French advance trod hard upon the hoche heels, and the 
church alone is not so wiped out that it can not be recog- 
nized. Mines were hurriedly set off under each corner, and 
the edifice collapsed upon itself in an enormous heap of 
brick and stones and mortar. From the blasted, defiled 



176 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

cemetery behind, some Teutonic wag wrenched a great iron 
cross, thrust it upright into the brickheap, and scribbled 
in mocking French on its horizontal arms, "C'est la 
guerre." And some one else printed above it in strong char- 
acters the same line that appears across the fagade of the 
riven town hall of Peronne : "Nicht argern, nur wundem 
— Don't rage — wonder!" 

I sat on the edge of the ruin surveying the desolation, 
and talking with Tire G , a soldier priest, when I be- 
came conscious that he was not listening. I looked up. A 
commanding figure in his horizon blue, his big fists clasped 
upon his broad chest, his eyes blinded by the tears that 
flowed unashamed, he stared unhearing, unseeing, upon the 
broad swath of the retreat. Shepherds of souls! How it 
must wring these men to know their vocation is no longer 
to save, but to destroy — to prove their piety, their fitness as 
spiritual leaders by their valor in the field ! 

There is a headquarters here, or was in September, and 
we were taken over to be presented to the General Ixe and 
his delightful staff, who entertained us royally at tea. The 
headquarters building had big, dry, well-ventilated cellars 
and corridors banked with sandbags and corrugated sheet- 
iron which afforded fair shelter against everything but di- 
rect bombardment from the air. A day or two before our 
visit a hoche avion had tried for the building, missed it by 
perhaps a hundred feet, and demolished a motor and its 
occupants. Before that similar visits had battered up both 
building and officers, so we were warned to take instant 
cover if a hostile machine appeared. 



HATE 177 

The main salon was decorated gaily with multi-colored 
bunting and the flags of the Allies, from Siam to the 
United States. There was some dubiety in the mind of the 
senior Major about the Chinese republican flag, and he con- 
fided his doubts that he had enough stripes and colors in 
the piebald affair, which some considerate soul had labeled 
carefully "Drapeau de la Chine" so that none need mistake 
it for playful camouflage. A sudden stir announced Mon- 
sieur le General, a fine, short, sturdy figure of a man with 
kindly eyes that took in everything, and gave nothing back 
by way of comment. He talked with us a few moments, 
expressed his satisfaction that the United States was at last 
an ally in fact as well as in soul, drank a toast with us, and 
was gone. 

How wonderful the French imagination, to call their 
Engineers who work marvels of rehabilitation, Genie! 
Aladdin's genii of the lamp could hardly do more. The 
young Lieutenant of Genie who replaced the old stone 
bridge by a temporary wooden structure strong enough to 
pass artillery, had lived some time in New York. With 
the Brooklyn Bridge in mind, he contrived to make his 
lofty wooden piers with their hempen cables, skeletons 
though they were, look like the towering edifice of stone 
and steel across the East Eiver. But for fear his work 
might pass unrecognized, he had the lintels of each pier 
carved, in graceful remembrance of his model : 

JUSSY's BROOKLYN 



CHAPTEE XII 



RECONSTRUCTION 



'Appalling Devastated Region of France ! "Would that 
every American might be taken through it to see something 
of what frightfulness means, to realize what might, saving 
our Allies, have been our portion! But frightfulness has 
failed to bring France to her knees. Neither has it brought 
her into the arms of her violator, as "W. A. Kuhn prophe- 
sied back in 1914 at the beginning of the war: "The future 
must lead France once again to our side ; we will heal it of 
its aberrations, and, in brotherly subordination to us, it 
may share with us the task of guiding the fate of the 
world" ! And so, while most of her energy is still focused 
implacably upon war and the defeat of her enemy, she is 
serenely able to begin rehabilitating the devastated houses, 
the devastated soil, the yet more devastated souls of her 
children, to be ready, when peace comes, to take up life 
once more with clear eyes and a vision unclouded by the 
black memories of outrage. 

The smoke of the French guns was hardly dissipated be- 
fore the region was invaded by rescuers who immediately 
fell to work to clean up, to repair, to bring the essentials 
of life to the returned refugees. The looting of the towns 
had been as complete as their subsequent destruction. 

178 



RECONSTRUCTION 179 

Every useful particle of metal, rubber, wool, leather, cord- 
age, paper ; all the food for both man and beast ; all the ve- 
hicles ; every piece of furniture ; bric-a-brac, objects of art, 
musical instruments ; even old clothes and shoes that could 
be utilized to make anything, were loaded on carts in classi- 
fied lots and sent back to Germany to be converted for the 
use of the Army, or sold in the Loot Warehouse established 
officially to let the Germans at home buy for a song what- 
ever they might need, or desire as souvenirs. The plunder- 
ers did not overlook bed and table linen, kitchen and table 
ware, glass and crockery, no matter how poor and humble. 
Faithful disciples of Nietzsche ! His ruthless doctrines that 
the world merely smiled at as the vaporings of a madman 
were the text the Germans expounded here to the very let- 
ter — "Life is, in its essence, appropriation, injury, the over- 
powering of whatever is foreign to us and weaker than our- 
selves, suppression, hardness . . . !" What they could 
not possibly remove, they destroyed and befouled. The 
consequence was that when the people drifted back, whether 
they had shelter or not, there was not a knife or fork or 
spoon, not a tablecloth or napkin, not a pot or pan, not even 
a tin dipper left. Not a kitchen stove remained for cook- 
ing, nor was there anything to cook. 

I wish I could make the awfulness of the situation real to 
the reader. I can't ! The mind can not grasp such an utter 
vacuum. Nobody who has not been on the spot can realize 
what it means to face the absolute lack of every single thing 
necessary to maintain life. So the first work of reconstruc- 



180 .WITH THEEE ARMIES 

tion was not so much to give the victims adequate shelter 
as it was to provide beds, coverings, food and the things 
with which to cook and to eat it. Townsfolk and peasants 
alike proved difficult indeed to manage — half-crazed by 
what they had been compelled to undergo and to witness, 
and, worst of all, to fear. Reason they would not listen to. 
They flew to the ruins that had once been their homes, and 
their grief, their rage, their pitiful impotence would have 
torn any but a German heart. "When the work of recon- 
struction was commenced, hundreds of them insisted on re- 
maining in the damp, unsanitary shelters they had burrowed 
under the ruins of their houses. The rescuers — among the 
very first to bring help were many heroic Americans, 
women as well as men — had provided, so far as possible, 
for every contingency. But for all their thoughtful- 
ness and prevision, they were unable to bring everything 
needed on those first emergency trips. Little by little 
something was done for each — clothes here, food there, a 
bed yonder ; a nonagenarian tottered away under the unac- 
customed load of a mattress and covers for himself and his 
feeble wife ; a ten-year-old staggered under the weight of a 
burden heavy enough for any full-grown man; an ancient 
dame scowled with exaltation over her wheelbarrow-load 
of mattress, bedding, kitchen-table and odds and ends, 
fierce as a mother hen if any dared approach her. 

The major portion of the work was naturally the task 
of the French Army. While the ruins still smoked, it ex- 
tracted hidden mines, gathered up unexploded shells and 



RECONSTRUCTION* 181 

bombs, put the roads in condition for hard usage, pacified 
the almost wild inhabitants who had remained in the re- 
gion, and enticed back scattered refugees. It sent out geo- 
graphical, agricultural and arboricultural experts every- 
where. They surveyed the eighty thousand slaughtered fruit 
trees and revived, crown-grafted, budded ; decided upon the 
best and quickest way to get the people to producing their 
own food again ; and set the example by drafting artillery 
horses and men to plow and seed and cultivate the wounded 
earth. The Genie in the vicinity of Noyon alone, by May 
20, 1917, had patched up innumerable houses, planted fifty- 
two hectares of ground, started and carried well toward suc- 
cess those innumerable little truck-gardens with which this 
corner of fertile Picardy is filled. And everywhere the 
simplest, most direct methods were followed. Eor once, 
in the face of distress, France tossed red tape to the winds 
and worked only for results, but with a thoroughness that 
assured the permanency of the results. 

The task was beyond our conception. The Prefect of the 
Somme reported that in his district alone no less than 238 
communes had been destroyed, with a total loss of more 
than 20,000 houses. Perhaps this sort of thing was what 
that pet anathema of all true Britons, the renegade H. S. 
Chamberlain, meant in glorifying the German Army's 
"peaceful work behind the fronts" which "bears witness 
to a thorough spiritual culture and a living organization 
such as the world has never seen." 

Between the Army constructions and the aid coming 



182 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

from outside sources, mostly from societies of civilians 
aided by British, and American effort and money, 1,100 
temporary hnts or houses had been assured by September 
15, 1917, though only 142 habitable shelters and fifty-four 
barracks had been actually constructed, eight of which were 
combinations of town hall and school. More than half a 
million francs' worth of agricultural machinery and tools 
had been distributed, 500 implements smashed by the Ger- 
mans repaired, and 1,500 more brought to the shops estab- 
lished by the British at Peronne for repair. Similar forges 
and machine-shops were in process of construction in other 
localities, an immense depot of seeds and foodstuffs estab- 
lished in one place, and another started not far off. More 
than a million and a half horses, cows, sheep, pigs, rabbits 
and chickens had been distributed to give the peasantry a 
new start, and six batteries of ten tractors each were plow- 
ing and harrowing steadily, with six more similar batteries 
to come shortly, while already thirty of the poisoned cis- 
terns, 265 of the wells and twenty important ponds had 
been sanified. All this in one district in five months ! 

The French mind has an attachment to the soil entirely 
foreign to our experience. Not even bombardment can 
always drive the French peasant from his ancestral acres; 
he clings to his tiny glebe with a tenacity which seems to 
us both foolhardy and nonsensical. With my own eyes I 
have seen peasants working calmly in their fields, seem- 
ingly indifferent to the murder-music of the shells flying 
over their heads. Paradoxically enough, once the peasant 



EECONSTEUCTION 183 

is dislodged, it requires more than material things to bring 
him back and reroot him in his proper sphere. There was 
but one way apparent for its accomplishment: to bring 
back the Mayor of his town, and establish at least the 
phantom of his commune. 

Since to the peasant mind the commune is the extension 
or expansion of his own family, what more natural than 
that he is eager to return to his home when he knows he 
will find the Mayor and his family already there — housed, 
perchance, in a wet cellar or a former stable, but there, 
and ready to give him the paternal advice and scoldings 
and unflagging encouragement he feels he has a right, as 
a son of France, to expect? The very last thing an Amer- 
ican farmer would want would be a meddlesome official to 
pry into what he was doing and worry him with advice; 
nor would he be greatly encouraged by such efforts. The 
Frenchman, however, pitches in with a will, his neighbors 
hear the Mayor and Big Jim and their families are back, 
and before any one quite realizes it, all of the town that 
can possibly get back have returned. But how pitiful a tale 
the figures tell — 250 of the original seven hundred inhabit- 
ants have come back to their native Vrely, three hundred to 
Sermaize, four hundred to Lagny, fifteen of the 220 to pretty 
Folies, twenty-four to Margny-of-the-Cherries, twenty of 
the 287 to Bouchoirs, only one to Eoiglise ! What tragedies 
of death, of disappearance, of forced labor in captivity lie 
behind these significant accounts of the repatriation ! 

Euskin had no vision of the modern Hun when he wrote, 



184 WITH THREE ARMIES 

of past invasions of France: "Whatever the name, or the 
manners, of their masters, the ground delvers mnst be the 
same, and the goatherd of the Pyrenees, and the vine- 
dresser of Garonne, and the milkmaid of Picardy, give 
them what lords yon may, abide in their land always, 
blossoming as the trees of the field, and enduring as the 
crags of the desert." No; we must look to a twentieth- 
century German as our prophet. He approves of the com- 
plete annihilation of conquered peoples, but says : "To-day 
this is physically impracticable, but one can imagine con- 
ditions which should approach very closely to total destruc- 
tion." 

All the organizations that are at work are cooperating 
in such a harmonious and judicious division of the task 
that France is making tremendous strides toward her old, 
sane, normal life. On their own part, the people are mani- 
festing their heritage from the past — the Celtic tempera- 
ment whose buoyancy bears them bravely up in stress ; the 
Roman logic that has enabled them to think clearly and to 
reorganize their whole mode of life on the new basis made 
necessary by losses and privations ; the Frankish love of the 
soil and industry which has rejuvenated field and home 
with a swiftness all but incredible. 

Innumerable civil organizations have sprung into exist- 
ence to complete the work the Army began and necessarily 
can not complete. Each one in its own field, often with 
the slenderest of resources, is working miracles: surveying 
and establishing disputed boundaries between farms whose 



EECONSTKUCTION 185 

lines have been obliterated, providing labor, advancing the 
farmers money against the sale of their expected crops, 
giving houses to whole communities at a time, and in gen- 
eral reestablishing the social life of the region around the 
solid bases of the municipality, the school and the church. 

One of these organizations, the "Fund for War Devas- 
tated Villages," showed me how much an energetic and 
determined woman can accomplish practically single- 
handed. The Honorary Secretary, Mrs. Arthur H. Wethy, 
an American citizen, has performed the miracle of getting 
ladies of different nationalities to work together, trans- 
ported quantities of clothing and food to the needy villages 
between Soissons and Compiegne, made tour after tour of 
investigation and inspection, and done the large amount 
of secretarial work required in the interim. 

"Oh, if you could only get us a motor!" she cried one 
day. "We have the occasional use of one rickety old ma- 
chine ; and the Government lends us an Army machine once 
in a while, but if we only had our own, we could go four 
times as fast and far. Can't you get us one in America?" 

To my own unbounded astonishment, I succeeded in se- 
curing a fine new car — and the War Department refused it 
transportation because of the pressure of military necessi- 
ties ! The headquarters of the Society are at 32, rue Tait- 
bout, Paris. They lack funds, clothing, blankets; they 
lack everything, and beg America for more, and more, and 
yet more of everything to meet the pressing need. 

One of the largest single undertakings has been that of 



186 WITH THEEE AKMIES 

the English Society of Friends, the British Quakers. Fight 
in battle they would not; but they are spending themselves 
freely in the reconstitution of that long and horribly deso- 
lated section covered by the "front" where the battle of the 
Marne turned the edge of the invader's sword. The 
Friends' headquarters are in the obliterated town of 
Tugny-et-Pont, in the little valley between the Somme 
and the Canal of St. Quentin, where they cleared a large 
area of rubbish and mines, and began their work of grace 
by first of all getting a residence of sorts ready for the 
Mayor, so that his return might bring its natural conse- 
quence of general repatriation. 

Already they have reared more than six hundred tempo- 
rary houses throughout their region, distributed more than 
a thousand pairs of chickens and hares, 12,000 packets of 
clothing, 2,500 beds, and in innumerable ways helped more 
than thirty-five thousand persons in 282 different villages. 
In addition, they have given the peasants 128,000 francs' 
worth of seeds and manure, agricultural machinery and 
garden tools. Their maternity hospital has not only brought 
to light more than four hundred babies, but it attends 
them afterward, when the conditions in which their par- 
ents are still forced to live threaten the new lives. Their 
endeavor, in a word, has been to build, not only for the 
present, but for the future as well. Truly the Friends of 
England are friends of France ! 

There is other reconstruction going on in France to-day, 
reconstruction more kindly, more important than the 




Five-year-old boy, of Northern France, whose left hand was cut off 
by one of the barbarians just before the German retreat 

Photographed by Mrs. Arthur H. Wethy, an American and the Honorable 
Secretary of the Funds for Devastated Villages 




Copyright 1917, Kodel & Herbert 

Ruined Reims and its Cathedral. The city is on fire 
from incendiary shells 




Cathedral at Nieuport 



iBECONSTEUCTION" 187 

building of new houses, or even than restoring the com- 
munal life. It is a form of reconstruction that reaches no 
mere narrow belt of country, like the Devastated Eegion, 
but extends its beneficent work from Dunquerque to Mar- 
seilles, from Brest to Nancy. It is the rehabilitating of the 
muUles, the men who have come through the fire perma- 
nently maimed. Go out into the highways and byways of 
France and see them. Look at the carriageman who stands 
at the door of your hotel, his breast medaled, one sleeve 
pinned below the decorations. See that taxi driver skil- 
fully manipulating a Noah's Ark of a machine with a 
wooden foot. Why are the crutches standing behind the 
pair of yonder municipal or police functionary; why does 
that Breton sailor still in his naval uniform, wear his hair 
woman-long, and brushed down over one eye and the whole 
side of his face? Arms, legs, eyes, faces, features — how 
can these be reconstituted? How are the men, when the 
surgeons have done their kindest and best, to be saved from 
the fate battle would impose upon them by this mutilation 
: — how saved from themselves ? Can it be done ? 

It can! It is being done every day. The world knows 
already in considerable detail the indefatigable efforts 
France is making to re-educate these men who have given 
their own bodies to the torture for her sweet sake. It 
knows how every art and science have been brought into 
play to fit the victim of the barbarian for a useful part in 
the reconstituted society of to-morrow. The trades and 
professions are being recruited from the mutiles who, once 



188 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

their interest in living is reawakened, grasp at the oppor- 
tunity to retain their self-respect with the eagerness of the 
drowning clutching at straws. The blindman makes a mar- 
velously keen-fingered masseur — able to help restore his 
fellow mutiles. Men who did nothing but manual labor 
before their mutilation have been well schooled in the ordi- 
nary sense, then taught telegraphy, shorthand, typewriting 
beside, and put to work without delay. Even the armless 
have been re-educated and put into occupations where their 
false hands are not an insuperable obstacle. One unfortu- 
nate, who lost sight, smell, taste and hearing, has blos- 
somed out as an author with a cheery philosophy ! 

To save the muffle and defeat the profiteer who would 
exploit him, while at the same time causing no strikes or 
other industrial disturbances, is a problem that for more 
than a year has had the attention of the Ministry. The 
question is not easy of solution, but an approach has been 
made by the suggestion of the parliamentary socialist group 
that each employer throughout the country be compelled 
to employ a certain percentage of his hands from among 
the mutiles at a wage to be determined upon by suitable 
authorities ; the inauguration of a National Placement Bu- 
reau working side by side with the National Re-education 
Office ; the distribution of the mutiles throughout the coun- 
try in such a way as to provide them all with a reasonable 
living without upsetting local conditions ; and the coopera- 
tion on non-partisan lines of every chamber of commerce, 
association patronale, and workmen's syndicate. (The 



KECONSTKUCTION 189 

same thing is going on in England, with equal results ; and 
in Canada, where not one of the fourteen thousand mutiles 
thus far received from the front lacks a job.) 

In a word, France is laying the foundations for the 
after-war days by learning how the bustling, important 
American corporations get things done not only quickly, 
but well; learning the value of intensive effort, the value- 
lessness of her traditional red tape. And if perchance in 
some things she is solving timely questions by taking purely 
temporary measures to keep her world amove, regardless of 
the true solution, she knows full well that they are tempo- 
rary; and to-morrow, when she has had time to wipe the 
bloody sweat from her eyes, she will astonish us anew — as 
she astonished us at the Marne — by displaying her genius in 
a new role and developing a national efficiency in economic 
reconstruction that will go far toward refitting her to as~ 
sume Her former role as the banker of civilizationo 

Standing clear, a marble figure "against a black curtain, 
apart from all the appalling loss of life, far beyond all the 
other immemorial destruction, is the loss of the beloved 
Cathedral of Eeims. Its universal appeal of beauty and 
sentiment makes its loss not a loss to the France alone 
which created it, but to the whole world. Brought forth 
in that most creative of all the creative centuries, the glori- 
ous thirteenth, it marked the soaring crescendo of the 
Gothic — the noblest example of the noblest and most truly, 
nationally interpretative type of architecture mankind Has 



190 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

been able to produce since the days of the vast Doric 
temples of Greece. It rose above the smoky old city a per- 
fect gem of architecture, reared as the supreme offering of a 
people which felt its chief end to be the glorifying of its 
Creator. 

Not another structure in France, secular or religious, 
has the meaning of this Cathedral. Almost from the day 
it was consecrated, the Kings of France, with but very few 
exceptions, were crowned within its glorious chancel. In 
that sense, it was the cradle of the nation. The very life 
of France was given new vitality and fresh impetus in the 
greatest coronation of all when, in 1429, Joan of Arc, the 
triumphant maid of the angelic visitants and visions, stood 
there before the great altar and saw Charles VII crowned 
as King. And so the vast church, a beneficent white spirit, 
brooded above the city that huddled about its soaring walls 
and towers for more than seven centuries, the most preg- 
nant period in the life of France. It saw the dawn and 
culmination and wane of the Eenaissance ; it was unmoved 
while America was found and half won and lost; it wit- 
nessed the ambitious plans of the Napoleonic Era and the 
Empire; its beauty remained undimmed and untouched 
through the bitter struggle that culminated in the separa- 
tion of State and Church, within our present memories. 

Nothing but Kultur could harm it; Kultur has clone its 
worst. The shells came howling over from the distant hills 
in 1914, and they have kept coming ever since. The towers 
are shot through and through. The great roof is gone. 



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OBDER 



To the People of Liege 



The population of Andenne, after making a display of 
peaceful intentions towards our troops, attacked them in 
the most treacherous manner. With my authorization, the 
General commanding these troops has reduced the town to 
ashes and has had 110 persons shot. 

I bring this fact to the knowledge of the people of Liege 

in order that they may know what fate to expect should 

they adopt a similar attitude. 

Genekal von Bulow. 
Liege, 22nd August, 1914. 



BECONSTKUCTION" 191 

Statues and moldings and delicate, fragile traceries, gro- 
tesques and ornaments have been shot away. Within, the 
fire of the incendiary shells has wiped out all that elabo- 
rate magnificence of woodwork and decoration that made it 
a consecrated marvel. The windows lie in splintered frag- 
ments on the floor, mingled in shining protest with the 
charred debris of the woodwork. The huge pillars that 
support the crossing threaten at any time to give way and 
let the walls crumble in to complete the ruin. 

Never was there grander manifestation of the Gothic 
ideal than that triple western portal, about whose lofty 
doors a goodly company of more than five hundred saints 
and angels and personages waited in their cloistered niches 
to welcome the believer to the Presence within. To-day 
protecting sandbags, ten feet thick and thirty feet high, 
are piled against the beheaded, mutilated figures and 
facade, to hold them safe — : and in the very closeness cf 
their protection are disintegrating the stone with the accu- 
mulated moisture of the passing seasons. 

There has been idle talk in both France and America 
about restoring the Cathedral. There is even a fund in 
Chicago to be devoted to that purpose when the war shall 
end. Eestore it ? Think of those matchless thirteenth- and 
sixteenth-century windows, built up laboriously, lovingly, 
of glass which filched the spectrum from the heavens; glass 
of crimson, of gold, of blue, of green; bits of heaven 
wrought into jewels for the delight of man; glass the se- 
crets of whose manufacture have been lost ! Think of those 



192 WITH THREE ARMIES 

spirited statues, and ask yourself if the twentieth-century 
artisan, who works by the union scale with one eye on the 
clock, can sit before an insensate block of stone, and, by 
taking measurements and using his tools, batter out a 
figure informed and vivified by the same beauty, the same 
spirituality as the statue executed by the thirteenth-century 
worker, who toiled from dawn to dusk, whose heart lay at 
the tip of his chisel, and who worked, not for any paltry 
wage, but because he felt himself to be glorifying the God 
who made him ! 

ISTo ! Reims can not be restored. Preserve what can be 
preserved of the ancient structure. But in the name of 
God keep the spot where it stood, the debris of its ruin, 
hallowed and intact ! Build, if necessary, a new Cathedral 
on some other spot, but take no thought for a restoration 
as idle and empty as it would be purely mechanical. As 
soon restore heat to the moon ! 

The Cathedral is not dead, can not die. Far from being 
a soulless body from which the spirit has fled, it became, in 
the moment the first German shells burst upon and within 
it, a new, more glorious, spiritual temple, reared in the 
hearts of all mankind; the most revered Cathedral in the 
world, one that can never die even though it be reduced to 
a formless heap of broken stone. 

It is an everlasting monument to both Christianity and 
Kultur. 



CHAPTER XIII 

FRENCH SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME 

Many of the facts from which this chapter was prepared 
were obtained through the courtesy of an official of the French 
Foreign Office in Paris, Professor X — , of the Sorbonne. If I 
have used somewhat freely data taken from the various pub- 
lications and documents with which my professorial friend 
kindly loaded me, I know the teachers and investigators to 
whose unusual opportunities and indefatigable efforts the ma- 
terial is due, will be glad to know that their labors have found 
sympathetic audience in an allied country. 

" Johnny ! Oh, Johnny ! Time to go to school, dear." 

"Oui, Maman; oui, j'irais!" 

"Let me see, now — . Yon have your books, and your 
slate ; and your luncheon — . Oh, child — where is your gas- 
mask?" 

For months, so Madame R assured me, that was the 

formula she went through with petit Jean every morning 
before he started through the shell-torn streets of Reims 
for the astonishing school the authorities provided for the 
children of the beleaguered city down in the famous wine- 
caves, far below the reach of the terrible shells of the 
hoches. 

Think of it, you American fathers and mothers of tender 
children, six, eight, ten years old ! Picture your little Mary 
or Jack, if you can — but you can not ! — starting off gaily, 

193 



194 WITH THREE AEMIES 

as scores of other children did, ready to run if the frightful 
whistle ripped overhead, ready to thrust each little head 
into the stifling gas-mask that alone could save the delicate 
lungs and heart from the lacerating fumes of the gas- 
shells ! 

And think, too, what your sensations would be if your 
little Mary were brought home, as was Madame E ? s lit- 
tle Violette, bleeding and unconscious, but miraculously 
unhurt. Petit Jean explained to me graphically, with all 
the unconscious dramatic force of a child. 

"Oui, Monsieur, grace to God, my little sister escaped the 
hoche that time." He laughed as he gestured the disap- 
pointment of the grim German cannoneers at being cheated 
of their prey, especially, as he put it, with a curiously old 
and cynical shrug, since the prey was a plump little girl, 
who would "bleed so hard" ! 

"We ran along the street most dangerous, and nothing 
happened — not an obus, not a single shriek of one going 
over our heads. We got into a safe street. No shells had 
fallen there at all. Then suddenly, phwirrrr — bourn! One 
fell in our safe street. M on Bleu, it was so quick ! I was 
almost across the street when I heard it. Violette was in 
the middle, right behind me. The obus fell about twenty 
feet away. It struck one end of a rail of the trolley track, 
just as Violette stepped on the other. Oh, mon Dieu, how 
she flew through the air — thirty feet, Monsieur, on the end 
of that so-lively rail! Bang! against the stone wall she 
went. She was dead ! I knew she was dead. But a kind 



FRENCH SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME 195 

gentleman picked her up quickly. We ran home with her. 
Oh, les bodies — ces sales betes!" he cried fiercely, and beat 
the air with his fists. That harsh epithet for the Hun, 
heard in France only in moments of utter exasperation, 
came strangely from his sweet little mouth. 

Violette smiled up at me shyly, and bade me feel the big 
scar on her hard little head, "where the wall hit me, 
Monsieur !" 

Would to God I might put into the hearts and minds of 
those who read this hopelessly inadequate sketch a tithe of 
the emotion, the reverence, the profound admiration I 
have felt in studying the work of the French school-teachers 
on and behind the front, and the insouciant bravery of the 
children, whose recitations have been so often interrupted 
by the sour grumble of the guns and the eclat of bursting 
shells close at hand ! 

How strange that the first drop of French blood shed in 
the onslaught of barbarism against culture should have 
been that of a teacher ! The very first man to fall was the 
mobilized school-teacher, Corporal Andre Peugeot, of the 
Forty-Fourth Infantry, treacherously shot down at Jon- 
chery on Sunday morning, August second, twenty-four hours 
before war was declared. Since then how many other teach- 
ers, men and women alike, have fallen under the deadly 
wave of Kultur! Yet the educational life of the country 
Was never more passionately awake, more self -thrilled with 
the tremendous importance of its task, or better able to 
grasp opportunity both firmly and with subtle wisdom. 



196 WITH THREE ARMIES 

War was formally declared August third, during the sum- 
mer vacation, when the schools were naturally closed. A 
month later, the time drew near for their reopening; but 
how was it to he done, when the men teachers were prac- 
tically all of them with the colors? A teacher can not be 
picked up on the street as a ditch-digger may. Then some- 
body had a happy flash of memory. The conscription laws 
allow "indispensable workers" to be retained at their shops 
and works. Who could be more indispensable than a teacher ? 
"We'll have them back!" was the cry. But the teachers 
themselves had something to say. To a man they refused 
to come back, declaring it to be not only their duty but 
their right to keep their places in the ranks. 

Though the men did not come back, the schools opened, 
with numerous young women as substitute teachers. Many 
of them were mere children themselves, girls totally with- 
out experience. Often they were sent far from home, into 
unusual surroundings. Yet in almost every case their in- 
nate good sense and the exhilaration of the circumstances 
carried them triumphantly through every difficulty. 

The secondary, or higher, schools, if compelled to forego 
experience, at least required age and education in their 
teachers. To the call for help, men from every walk in 
life came forward, "each to his calling." Mathematics were 
the special province of engineers, chemistry and physics of 
the druggists, Latin of the lawyers and magistrates who 
in peaceful times drowsed or bickered among their tradi- 
tions and ordinances. Even the politicians gave a willing 



FRENCH SCHOOLS IN WAK TIME 197 

hand; and feeble old ex-teachers, useless for soldiering and 
the strenuous fight for bread of civil life, begged to be 
allowed to help. Many an old fellow previously desiccated 
and shelved was galvanized into comparative youth by the 
vivifying spark of war. Belgians also lent their aid. Not 
many in number, they were yet strong in scholarship and 
eager to work. Early in that first year of the war, some 
of the greatest of these Belgian savants were occupying 
chairs in French universities and technical schools where, 
until that time, a foreign professor was undreamed of. 
Others of humbler accomplishments were glad to teach in 
any school offered, and the courtesy France showed by 
taking them in was repaid by their excellent work in many 
a place vacant until their advent. 

The task of the school authorities was rendered doubly 
difficult by the lack of proper buildings. When school 
should have opened in 1914, almost every one of the nor- 
mal schools as well as more than two thousand public 
(elementary) schools were in use by the Army as hospitals, 
barracks and storehouses. Difficulty, however, only in- 
creased ardor. With both teachers and buildings lacking, 
the school year was none the less begun. 

What makeshifts there were ! The French smile at them 
now, but there is a certain misty tenderness in the smile. 
Every building that could house a school, from Palaces of 
Justice to "palaces" for "movies," from private houses to 
cafes, was pressed into service. The first contact between 
teachers and pupils was electrical. Only France mattered. 



198 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

Everything else for the moment was subordinated in teach- 
ing and learning the functions of the country, the proofs 
of its civilization and its hopes. The white heat of an 
aroused patriotism fused everything into that mold. In 
many a school the children's ardor was kept burning clear 
by the simple inscription over the absent teacher's chair : 

"To the memory of , our master, dead upon 

the field of honor. 
Do your duty as he has done his." 

But though the war was — and still is, at the present writ- 
ing — the dominant note, it was made to serve a vivifying 
purpose in teaching subjects usually far removed from its 
destructive activities: civics, for instance. The children 
were easily made to see that a town councilor, a mayor, 
any one of their so often pursy and self-conscious officials 
of the days of peace, was really a man inside his official 
skin, a stalwart guardian spirit for all his tubbiness and 
red nose, an inchoate hero instead of a mere political job- 
ster. Little Burgomaster Max, of Brussels, with his wiry 
beard and gimlet eyes, was a favorite illustration of the 
civilian whose patriotism and knowledge of his responsi- 
bility gave him courage to defy the armed German swag- 
gerer and bully. 

The children were not permitted to forget the State ; and 
the State, on its part, did not forget its children. Whenever 
it was possible, the young mobilises were given permission, 
literally between actions, to return to their schools to be ex- 



FRENCH SCHOOLS IN WAS TIME 199 

amined and graduated. On June 30, 1915, the Dean of the 
Faculty of Nancy received a letter from an anxious father : 

"1 am sending you my son, who came this morning from 
the trenches, where he has passed a terrible week, which 
prevented him from preparing properly for the examina- 
tions. Please put him through at the earliest possible mo- 
ment, so that he will not have to remain away from the 
squad he commands any longer than absolutely necessary." 

The young Sergeant returned to his post the fifth of 
July. Two days afterward the Dean received another note 
from the father : 

"Many thanks for having passed my dear son so quickly. 
At six o'clock this evening he was killed at Bois-le-Pretre." 

So died, on July 6, 1915, Sergeant Marcel Ferrette, aged 
eighteen, Baehelor-of- Arts-to-be. 

Of course, the spectacular thing all through this war has 
been the schools scattered along the different fighting 
fronts, sometimes within a mile of the advanced trenches. 
The teaching went steadily on with the shells and ballets 
finding their billets in the schoolhouses themselves. Only 
a great epic could paint the picture in its truly heroic col- 
ors. In the Marne a group of children, during one exam- 
ination, was entirely wiped out by a sudden rain of shells. 
At Saint-Die the Rector suspended the Young Women's 
College one afternoon, and the next, at the hour when the 
girls usually left the building, a shell burst in the front 
door and practically demolished the structure. A school 



200 WITH THREE ARMIES 

in the Meuse, still open, was smashed into fragments — • 
fortunately on Sunday — but one teacher was killed. A girl 
teacher at Paissy (Aisne) kept her little school in a cave, 
where she was surprised by a bombardment. Grouping her 
children behind her, for an hour she closed the entrance 
against the explosions and bits of shell with her own body. 
Amazingly enough, she was not even scratched, they say, 
though some of the ragged shell-splinters flew past her and 
buried themselves in the children's benches. 

Only seven secondary schools were closed along the front 
line: Arras, Soissons, Saint-Die, Pont-a-Mousson, Sainte 
Menehoulde, Verdun and Reims. It seemed like giving a 
victory to the enemy to close them, and it was not done 
until the teachers themselves granted it was dangerous to 
keep them open another moment. Dangerous! Bethune, 
for instance, during the eighteen months following the dec- 
laration of war, was bombarded no less than fifty-eight 
times, yet the schools went right on. 

"I won't leave my school until it threatens to fall on my 
head !" "I will stay at my post until the shells drive me 
out !" "I am only a woman, but the shells won't hurt me 
any more than they do the men !" These are mere examples 
of the attitude most of the teachers took, many of them 
not only going daily through perilous zones to their schools, 
but also shepherding their pupils back and forth. 

Most picturesque of all were the schools in the cham- 
pagne caves of Reims. In October of 1914 it was impos- 
sible to open schools in the city because violent bombard- 



FRENCH SCHOOLS m WAR TIME 201 

ments were an almost daily occurrence. In December a 
young woman teacher came to Monsieur Octave Forsant, 
the local inspector, and suggested opening a gar dene (day- 
nursery) down in the champagne caves to take care of the 
littler children, and keep them out of both mischief and 
danger. The scheme worked so well that M. Forsant was 
glad to see it develop into a number of regular schools. The 
Mumm Cave had the honor of receiving the first, which 
was named the Ecole Joffre. Others followed, two of them 
named respectively for King Albert I of Belgium and for 
General Dubail. 

In one of his reports M. Forsant said : "What a spectacle 
revealed itself as I first went through these caves ! Belgian 
refugees and children of France were mixed together in 
them side by side with soldiers. Many of the unlucky peo- 
ple of the Ardennes, come down from Mezieres and Bethel, 
and those Eemois who had temporarily left their bom- 
barded houses, had crammed themselves in with the school 
children. They had brought their beds, their cooking 
stoves, their lamps, lanterns and candles. Sweat and smoke 
mingled with the smells of cooking and the steamy effluvia 
arising from drying clothes. An acrid odor took one by the 
throat. The women, for the most part badly coiffed and 
half-dressed, with children clinging to their skirts, came 
and went through these vast corridors, happy indeed to 
have found any asylum from the storm of steel raging over- 
head. In such a place, so little suited to educational pur- 
poses, I hesitated long before agreeing to open schools. But 



202 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

it had to be done, and on January 22 (1915), wishing 
not only to ameliorate the condition of the children, hut 
to relieve their parents also, I opened the Jo fire School."* 

The calm of the children, during even the most violent 
bombardment, was astonishing. They seemed no more 
afraid, even with shells bursting directly overhead, and the 
town itself falling to pieces or burning up, than did the de- 
voted teachers, who considered their personal danger a 
small thing compared with their opportunity to render a 
service to France as precious as it was far beyond the usual. 
In 1916 there were thirty-six teachers in these cave schools 
of Eeims alone, handling a total enrolment of five hundred 
children. On July seventh of the same year, out of one 
hundred and twenty-five children registered for the exami- 
nation for a certificate (the equivalent of a grammar-school 
certificate), one hundred and twenty-three were present. 
The year before there were only thirty-five ! 

The little Remois continued in the cave schools until 
March 30, 1917. They had more attention paid to them 
than perhaps any others in France. Correspondents visited 
them, ladies brought them bonbons, the great champagne 
houses who had offered them the hospitality of their caves, 
adopted them, and each year gave them Christmas trees 
and "movie" shows. Their crowning entertainment came 
on January 28, 1917, when, after a violent bombardment 
in the morning, one of the Army's cinematograph operators 



*My translation: M. Forsant's report in the Rivue des Deux 
Mondes, September, 1917. 



FRENCH SCHOOLS IJST WAR TIME 203 

made a remarkable film of the children at their under- 
ground play, of a gas-mask drill, of a drill to evacuate the 
school, and of the women teachers guiding their charges 
back to their homes, through streets in which the shells 
were still falling. 

In keeping the educational traditions of France alive 
during these stormy days, the work of the schools was only 
begun. Much that has been accomplished in aid of the 
soldiers could not possibly have been done without the work 
of these intense, patriotic school boys and girls. Some of 
them adopted soldiers and wrote to them regularly. Some 
paid for educating penniless orphans. Here a class adopted 
an orphaned girl, and saved up religiously so as to give its 
charge a chance at future happiness by providing her even- 
tually with the indispensable dot or marriage portion. 
There a school adopted a whole regiment, and sent it every- 
thing needed, from tarred boots to safety-pins. And some 
adopted wounded poilus, caring for them with the tender- 
ness of the little brother for the big. Many a school, too, 
raised funds for the wounded, each child giving its pit- 
tance proudly and regularly. Others helped by forming in- 
numerable "Bands" or Societies each named for its chosen 
work like the "Oeuvre (Work) of the Weekly Egg," in which 
each member provided an egg a week for the hospitals ; the 
"Work of the Pocket-Money"; the "Work of the Two Vege- 
tables;" and in various parts of the country the children 
gathered and stored the "Seeds of Autumn" in preparation 
for the spring planting. 



204 WITH THREE AEMIES 

Of what was done this side of the front we have ample 
details in the Government reports, but only scraps of news 
filtered through that grim gray German line which still 
snakes its ugly length all the way across north France. Bit 
by bit an idea of the makeshifts and heroisms of the teach- 
ers of Longwy, Roubaix, Turcoing, Douai and other towns 
can be pieced together. Here the Germans detained the 
women teachers because they were accomplishing much 
good for their townsfolk ! What the real reason was may be 
only too clearly revealed if the melancholy list of Ger- 
many's diabolisms is ever compiled. In other towns the 
women teachers were ordered out as bouche inutile (useless 
mouths) — consumers of valuable food. To the last woman 
they refused to go, clinging to their schools heroically in 
the face of almost certain abuse. Many a school in these 
invaded towns was taught almost in whispers; taught the 
French language, literature, history, tradition, with a fer- 
vor, as a French writer puts it, "which resembled the fervor 
usually reserved for the sacred texts. And the children 
performed their duties as if they were consecrating them- 
selves by acts of faith" — as indeed they were ! 

French temperament and heroism were no less in con- 
tinual evidence in the prison camps in Germany itself. The 
author of L'Ecole et la Guerre, himself a Professor, relates 
that at grim old Saxon Zwickau, where many civilians have 
been imprisoned, two women teachers from the Ardennes 
found themselves among seventy child prisoners ranging 
from three to fourteen years of age. What could they do, 




Verdun. Classroom in a primary school in the Cathedral quarters 




Reims. School children on the Street of the Martyrs 




A sight of the ruins at Nauvrone Vingre — Aisne 









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Once the main street of the village Craoune — Aisne 



FRENCH SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME 205 

in a prison camp ? First of all, they braved the command- 
ant, and wrung from him an unwilling permission to estab- 
lish a school. Somehow they discovered a few books. A 
German petty officer, in peace time a teacher of French, 
got them three grammars. A bit of linoleum served as a 
blackboard, and each child was provided by some hook or 
crook with a slate and a bit of chalk. In other camps of 
civilians, similar efforts were made, and the teachers even 
went so far in some as to establish debating societies for 
themselves of the sort they had enjoyed at home. Nobody 
but the French — or perhaps Americans !— would have had 
the spirit in such surroundings to argue profoundly "the 
best way to insure a large school attendance" ! 

What a different, and how much cheerier, tale Alsace 
tells ! Not much of it is French even yet, after nearly four 
years of struggle; but what there is is mightily encourag- 
ing, and the day when the tricolor displaced the hated red, 
white and black was a gala day indeed. School opened first 
in Massevaux, a charming little old-world backwater which 
was still lulled by the distant growling of the guns behind 
the mountain when I visited it last September. I talked 
with adults and children alike all over the repatriated sec- 
tion. The adults were still shy, reserved, not sure of them- 
selves; unable to realize as yet that they might speak the 
tongue of their infancy without having a brutal Waclit- 
meister throw them into jail or beat them over the head 
with the flat of his saber. Though the older children 
sometimes lapsed into the gutturals of their long-hated 



206 WITH THREE ARMIES 

masters, the natural resiliency of youth generally made 
them forgetful of even the immediate past, and enabled 
them to revel in their present freedom. But to the littler 
children, born shortly before or since the war began, 
Erench is the native tongue, and they speak it easily, if in 
a somewhat rough and colloquial way. I was informed 
that already there are five thousand pupils in the new Alsa- 
tian schools, with more than a hundred teachers of both 
sexes. 

The graduation exercises for several towns of the vicin- 
ity, held at Rougemont-le-Chateau, near Belfort, in 1915, 
were exceedingly interesting. The graduating class was re- 
quired to write an essay in Erench — "Describe your own 
town, and state why your little country is so dear to the 
heart of every Frenchman." The judges included the ven- 
erable Rector of Besangon, a Professor from Paris, a mem- 
ber of the Superior Council of Public Instruction, local 
teachers and soldier-teachers. At times with tears blind- 
ing their eyes as effectually as any bo eke gas-shells, they 
passed upon the sixteen papers turned in — and solemnly 
filed them as "historic documents" in the Museum of 
Psedagogy ! 

Here, too, in Alsace, the children are doing work besides 
their lessons. In Massevaux I copied a poster displayed all 
over the village, addressed "Aux Enfants des Bodies — To 
the Children of the Schools," a free translation of which 
runs : "The Army needs comfort this winter. Gather fag- 
gots everywhere, dry them carefully, and bring them in 



FRENCH SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME 207 

five-kilogram bundles to the authorities the fourteenth and 
twenty-ninth of each month, and you will contribute to the 
national defense." 

Not all the mobilized teachers were given the oppor- 
tunity to display their heroism on the actual front or in 
the prison camps. Many of them, as need arose, became 
foresters, bill-posters, public printers, soup-kitchen direct- 
ors, managers of bakeries, laundries and post-offices; in 
fact, there was little they did not do. The diary of one 
such a teacher tells a vivid story of his patriotic busy-ness : 
5-8 a. m., work at the Town Hall, listening to public com- 
plaints, issuing passes, permits, etc.; 8-9 A. m., report to 
and consultation with the Mayor; 9-12 noon, same as from 
5 to 8 A. m., with the addition of visits to near-by towns 
to help there in the same way; noon to 1 P. M., luncheon 
and rest; 1-3 p. m., same as morning; 4-5 P. M., distribu- 
tion of materials to the bakers' workers. 

"Between times," he wrote, "I help at the telephone 
switchboard, act as an assistant guard, copy official dis- 
patches, check over the accounts of the bakery, sign a per- 
fect raft of papers by the Mayor's orders, and keep so gen- 
erally occupied that my day ends, as a usual thing, between 
ten and eleven at night." No wonder an Inspector said of 
teachers like these : "They, too, have made a campaign !" 

The story of quiet, unassuming, heroic accomplishments 
I have tried to tell has a special interest for America. Our 
relations with France have always been not only friendly 
but intimate. And to-day we stand with the French in 



208 WITH THREE ARMIES 

Europe as Lafayette and Rochambeau once stood with us 
in America. And on our part we can learn the lesson of 
their war-time schools, with all it means of entire consecra- 
tion and invincible self-abnegation under more dreadful 
conditions than humanity has ever seen before ; though, if 
"God still reigns' 5 and protects these United States, as they 
have been providentially protected in all their marvelous 
progress of a hundred and forty-two years, it will never be 
necessary for us to inscribe upon the diplomas of any of our 
school boys or girls anything like the lines that appeared 
upon each diploma presented at Reims in 1915 : 

"The student, — — — > by his work and his faithful- 
ness in following the courses, notwithstanding the 
danger and difficulty of the circumstances, merits this 
recompense. 

In a Champagne Cave 

The 332 d Day of Bombardment 

31st July, 1915" 



CHAPTER XIV 

IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAIN'S 

Olympus rises of necessity from the lowlands; heaven 
is heaven only because of hell. Alsace the lovely,, the 
picturesque; the sweet and placid country the French 
have been so earnestly trying to win back without laying 
waste, is all the lovelier by comparison with that melan- 
choly district north of Paris where hate had its unbridled 
way. 

"Do you know Alsace at all?" inquired Monsieur Zhee, 
of the Press Bureau of the Foreign Office, as he leaned 
back in his chair and regarded me thoughtfully a moment. 

I acknowledged that my wanderings had never taken me 
through the Vosges and the exquisite land of the "enfanis 
'perdus" — the "lost children" — who have been mourned 
steadfastly for all those barren years between the forced 
treaty of 1871 and the wild, mad dash that carried the 
French back into a part of their own in 1914, at the very 
beginning of the war. ISTow I was to see this thorn in the 
heart of France and the flank of Germany; and I was un- 
prepared. My Foreign Office friend began pulling books 
from his office shelves. 

"You must read up carefully before you go," he declared, 
piling me with paper-bound volumes. "It will be useless 

209 



210 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

for you to see what you do not understand. You can not 
understand the feeling we cherish for Alsace unless you 
know her history. This" — he handed me a bulky volume 
dealing with IS Alsace a trovers les Ages (Alsace through- 
out the Ages) — "will give you a general idea of Alsatian 
history and feeling; and these others" — heaping up half 
a dozen or more books and pamphlets dealing with every 
phase of the vexed question — "will help to give you some 
notion of the-country and its people." 

And I was expected to chew, swallow and digest all this 
between three p. m. and eight A. m. next day ! 

What an amazing people the French are! Here was a 
tremendously hard-worked, tired-out official of the Foreign 
Office, still so thoroughly Gallic at heart, despite years of 
residence in the United States, that he could not bear think 
an American — of whom he knew nothing and for whom he 
had no reason to care — should go ignorantly into Alsace, 
and perhaps bring away a wrong or an indefinite impres- 
sion. As Professor of French in a great American Uni- 
versity, Monsieur Zhee — camouflage for the first letter of 
his name, if you must have the reason for his apparently 
extraordinary appellation! — had been the teacher, friend 
and humorous critic of unnumbered classes of Americans. 
He had heard France call across the seas, and though he 
was well beyond the military age, responded immediately. 

"Did you get into the trenches yourself?" I inquired, as 
we chatted intimately in his little office, where newspapers 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 211 

and periodicals — lie was one of the censors— lay by the 
hundreds. 

He laughed. "Indeed I did ! Perhaps they thought me 
too near-sighted to shoot well. Maybe they thought the 
exercise would do me good. Anyway, they kept me doing 
nothing but digging ditches for eighteen months. Phew I" 
he murmured, reminiscently, and glanced at his hands, as 
if he would conjure back the blisters and callouses that 
unaccustomed ditch-digging had earned him. 

In a moment he was on the Alsatian theme again. With 
true Gallic sympathy and deftness he sketched the country 
and its beauty, drew me a vivid silhouette of its tragic 
story, hinted at the problems I should find visible there, 
saw to it by adroit questions and suggestions that I drew 
correct inferences ; and then he was of! like a swallow to a 
little history of the retired cavalry officer in whose company 
three of us — an Italian, another American and myself — 
were to explore the unknown. The pressure of routine 
work ahead of him made no difference. On his desk a 
tremendous heap of unopened mail clamored for atten- 
tion — "Yes, I shall be here this evening. One can read so 
much more quietly at night," was all he said, when I sug- 
gested that his time was valuable, and staggered out under 
the burden of my newly acquired but as yet unassimilated 
knowledge of Alsace in ten volumes. 

I thought of Monsieur Zhee as I pored over those books, 
and began to understand the demonstration that had taken 



212 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

place in the vast Place de la Concorde in Paris. It is stale 
history now, of course ; most probably it has been forgotten. 
But every one who has been there remembers the fine statue 
of the City of Strasbourg, the mourning draperies and 
wreaths of immortelles that covered it for no less than 
forty-three years. Prance was sharply criticized for that 
furious rush into Mulhouse and the attempt to recover 
Alsace at a single stroke just at the beginning of the war. 
It seemed a proof of volatility and sentiment which could 
not possibly accomplish anything against the material suf- 
ficiency of Germany. In reality it was a case of the Sab- 
bath-day rescuing of the sheep in the pit. The tumultuous 
acclaim and frenzy of the Parisians when they swarmed 
into the Place, tore down the mourning streamers and im- 
mortelles from Strasbourg's statue, and replaced them 
amid shouts and tears with the tricolor and brilliant living 
flowers, voiced the profoundest sentiment in the national 
heart. It was no mere hotspur act of revenge upon Ger- 
many for her brigandage of 1871. It was the only thing, 
the patriotic thing, the honorable thing, to strive to give 
back to Alsace the nationality she had claimed and loved 
for more than two hundred years. So the French could 
not have done anything else than invade impetuously, even 
though they were immediately driven out of most of what 
they had taken. The joy over the little section set free from 
the hated German yoke was enough to fire the whole coun- 
try, to give to its efforts to win more, to win all, that 
amazing steadfastness of purpose and unconquerable fight- 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 213 

ing power that has astounded not only the Germans but 
every one else. 

Dolleren, Oberbruch, Niederbruch, Weegschied, Bitsch- 
weiler — the trip seems like a dream, impossible in France 
with those names ! Yet before me lies the black and white 
record of every mile of it in my notes, from the damp, 
gloomy, fog-brushed morning when I walked half-way 
from my hotel to the railroad station trying to find a taxi, 
to the night when we returned, and emerged from the 
cavernous black shadows into the crowded Paris streets. 

First came the long railway journey from Paris east- 
ward across the loveliest part of central France. The train 
was more than half filled by men in uniform, the station 
platforms gray with "horizon blue" that gathered thickest 
below the square white flag with the red cross that, at each 
large station, hung outside the doorway to its little emer- 
gency hospital, whose lone nurse would swing along the 
running-board of the cars, jingling cup in hand, and beg 
with a fetching smile for the "Croix Rouge et nos blesses." 
On the way down to Belfort I dropped a franc in one such 
cup, and was rewarded with a smiling "Merci, mon Colonel 
Americain!" though I wore no uniform. On the way back, 
the same cup received a five-franc note — I could not afford 
to remain a mere Colonel ! — and this time the response was 
warmer still — "Merci! Merci mille fois, mon General!" 
The Italian correspondent, a former Lieutenant in Italy's 
heroic Army, incapacitated for further military duty and 
now serving a string of Milanese newspapers, regarded the 



214 WITH THEEE AKMIES 

five sous in his hand sourly as the smiling cup approached 
him, dropped them in, and snapped at me in Italian: 
"Generate! Per bacco, coi miei cinque soldi, non sono piu 
die caporale! (General! By Jove, with my five cents, I'm 
only a Corporal !)" Yet he was a good fellow, his outburst 
camouflage to cover his regretful inability to give more 
generously. 

The American grinned at me and suggested: "Give her 
five more, and she'll make you a Field Marshal or an 
Ambassador !" 

We sped past Melun and Troyes, Chaumont and Vesoul, 
through that rich vine country where even the black and 
fetid breath of war has not been able to dim the beauty 
or halt the industry that gives the region its charm. As 
we came into the broad plateau where Belfort lies, swept 
about by fields glowing with the tan of summer, we caught 
glimpses here and there of Fritz's activities — "souvenirs 
du boche" our Captain smiled: a stable with its slate roof 
shattered by a bomb, the smeared black ruin of what had 
been a farmhouse, or a haystack no longer a haystack but 
a brittle ash-pile. 

France is both very considerate of and generous with her 
official guests. The motor cars at our service were hand- 
some limousines painted the conventional blue-gray, not at 
all adapted for the hard mountain-climbing we were to do, 
but vastly more comfortable than any touring car could be 
in those chilly Vosges heights. Posted prominently inside 
each car, and fastened also to the dash, where the driver 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 215 

could not but see it, was a sign which, ordained the speed 
by both day and night, prescribed certain other rules re- 
garding lights and roads, and ended with a warning to 
"conserve the essence." Our silent soldier-drivers obeyed, 
too, and though the road out of Belfort ribboned away flat 
and straight, with hardly any traffic at all to impede a fast 
run, they held to the twenty-five-mile pace allowed all the 
way up to Massevaux. 

It was a supremely lovely ride in the waning afternoon. 
The road was white and smooth, despite the traffic of war 
that daily rolled over it. The gaunt old poplars bordering 
it on either hand, the brilliantly green or golden fields, the 
gradually increasing altitude and consequently changing 
scenery as we climbed the Vosges foothills, gave a variety 
and charm that made it hard to imagine ourselves directly 
back of the front. The farm wagons on the road clung to 
the center of the way with all their old peace-time per- 
sistence, and their peasant drivers eyed us with the familiar 
old hostility of injured selfishness as we passed — and repaid 
their glare with a choking cloud of white dust ! 

Giromany the quaint came first, and we felt ourselves no 
longer in France, but in some elfin land where everything 
was small. The houses bore the mark of French inspiration 
in their dully gleaming red tiled roofs, and the flowers that 
clambered over facade or side, dripped from the weather- 
fringed eaves, and caroused gaily up outbuildings and over 
stone walls; yet all had a curious tang and personality of 
their own, especially in their snubby gable-ends. Wide- 



216 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

spreading shade-trees stretched their protecting arms across 
the dooryards, and sunny-headed children stared at us or 
called to their busy mothers in a queer, guttural patois we 
could not understand. 

Nothing but a catalogue of rural beauties and mountain 
scenery could describe that ride as the road swung to the 
northeast up the valley of the Eose Montoise to Eierevesce- 
mont, which nestled picturesquely at the top. Then the 
valley, broader, nobler, steeper, of a small affluent of the 
river Doller, to Sewen, a lovely old Alsatian hamlet sprad- 
dled across a brawling green stream. Some of its walls 
are bullet-marked; here and there flame has left its black 
smudge. But how peaceful it was in that summer sunset, 
with its black-capped old women gossiping beside their 
front doors, its children playing about beside the little 
river and in the streets, and a couple of Missouri mules 
solemnly approving it all from a mound where they took in 
the view with placid eyes and occasionally wagging ears as 
they munched their evening hay. 

Captain A stopped the machines for a stroll through 

the village. The sight of two civilians and the gray of 

Signor S ? s Italian uniform, stained with his six months 

of fighting, drew attention immediately. The children 
gathered about us frankly curious; their elders, no less 
curious but not so frank, hung back a little. Staff cars did 
not often stop in Sewen without a reason, and the town is 
too close to the front not to be cautious and have a very 
lively memory. But our Captain should have been an 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 217 

ambassador. In three minutes lie had the children cling- 
ing to him and shouting, and the old folks crowded up 
close, telling him all about their simple lives. 

As we turned back toward our cars, loath to leave such 
a placid beauty spot, a very feeble old man, tottering along 
on a thick cane, straightened himself as well as he could, 
saluted with old-time precision, and smiled at us. Cap- 
tain A returned the courtesy with fine dignity. In the 

old man's buttonhole was the green and black ribbon of 
"70. A veteran! Yes, he admitted, he was of the — th 
Hussards, and what a hardship that he could not fight 
now ! Those hoches — ah ! If he were only thirty years 
younger ! But he had given four sons ; that was something, 
of course, but somehow the youngsters did not seem to 
have the spirit we used to have in 'seventy, when a fight 
was a real fight, and men could see one another. Nowadays 
— bah! He waxed passionate as he talked, forgot his age 
and used his stick in fiery gestures instead of leaning on it. 
We listened closely, but without understanding his thick 
speech — he would bitterly have resented being told he had 
acquired quite a Teutonic accent in his forty-three years 
of angry captivity! — when he proudly flung out his cane 
toward an exceedingly disreputable tricolor that seemed to 
mourn its disrepute from a near-by window. 

Captain A shot out his wrist and glanced at his 

watch. "We must be off," he said, in his crisp Oxford 
English, shook hands with the veteran, and waved us toward 
the cars, with a smile so misty we knew something was com- 



218 WITH THREE ARMIES 

ing. As He halted beside the nearer one, he pointed back to 
the veteran, who stood watching ns from the other side of 
the stream. 

"Yon saw the flag — the dirty old flag of France? 
Parhleu! He — that old fellow — saved it from capture in 
1870. He hid it. He sewed it inside his mattress. He 
slept on it for more than forty- three years. When we took 
the town, he ripped open the mattress and flung it out to 
welcome us in !" The Captain muttered something under 
his breath that would have been pious profanity in Eng- 
lish, and looked away an instant. When he turned back to 
us he said: "That is only one. There are scores of them 
— hundreds ! Hidden forty years from German spies and 
treachery under floors, in mattresses, buried, everywhere — « 
every one of them only waiting ! Waiting ! Get in, gentle- 
men; get in. En avant, mes enfants!" he added to the 
drivers. 

Up through Dolleren the green and quiet, through Ober- 
bruch, where the bridge over the mountain rivulet quivered 
and rattled ominously as we rolled slowly across, past 
Weegschied and Kirschberg and Niederbruch we climbed 
through the gathering gloom, half seeing, half imagining 
the veiled charm of each peaceful hamlet, coming at last 
to prosperous, happy Massevaux, or, as the Alsatians call it, 
Masemunster. The cars halted in a big, earth-floored square 

full of broad-branched plane trees, and Captain A 

took us up into the administration building to meet the 
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IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 219 

more like a German, with his bright blond hair and ruddy 
complexion, than like a Gaul. But he was French to the 
core, gifted with the keen logic, the ready humor, the 
irresistible spirit of his race. We must dine with him and 
his staff in an hour at Headquarters, and meantime, Cap- 
tain A must see that we were comfortably domiciled. 

"Well," remarked our American companion as we came 
down the broad oaken stair three abreast, "if this is war, 
I'm for it all the time !" 

The Italian looked inquiringly at me, and I interpreted. 
He shrugged. "War is always like that with the French," 
he observed a little bitterly. "In Italy, once the Staff 
passes you as properly accredited, you go where you please, 
when you please. You see the real thing. You can charge 
with the men, if you can persuade them to let you. I have 
been with them in the trenches as an officer, and I have 
been with them in charges as a correspondent. This is very 
poor amusement. I want to see a fight. We might be 
Cook tourists !" 

Poor Signor S ! His wound, the privations the Italian 

Army has suffered, the poverty and desperateness of the 
Italian situation, had no doubt burnt into his soul until he 
was hardly responsible for his ungracious attitude through- 
out the trip. We Americans also wanted to see a fight, but 
we had no especial wish to bring anxiety to our courteous 
guide and protector by drawing the fire of the enemy. And 
half an hour of solid creature comforts made a distinct, 
though only a momentary, change in Signor S 's mood. 



220 WITH THREE ARMIES 

As we met for dinner, he was beaming with satisfaction 
over his luxurious quarters and the kindness of his hostess. 

"You two American gentlemen will naturally wish to be 

together/" Captain A said as we left the administration 

building, "so I will take you up the road a little way to a 
very comfortable place where I am sure you will be welcome 
and contented." 

"Welcome and contented" in war time on the very fringe 
of the conflict ! It was an exceedingly comfortable country 
home, built strongly of red brick and set bad fifty yards 
from the road in a pretty little park of shrubs and flowers, 
with winding paths and a porter's lodge smothered in 
vines and roses. As we came up the steps, the doors swung 
open, and a trim Alsatian maid apologized profusely in 
perfect French for Madame's absence. If we would be so 
kind as to select our rooms, and permit her the honor of 
cariying up our grips — . 

We took a suite on the second floor overlooking the gar- 
dens and the valley, hedged in by the blue Vosges hills, 
about whose flanks clung the faint bluish-gra}'' mists of 
early evening. The rooms were huge, with lofty ceilings 
and tall, shuttered windows through which we could step 
out upon little balconies and look off down the halcyon 
vale. Between the two bedrooms was a washroom with 
massive new twin basins and furniture such as one sees in 
the older hotels here where bulky apparatus is no objection. 
Everything was clearly of German make — and hanging on 
the clothes-racks were several handsome German uniforms 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 221 

bearing a Major's insignia. Was the lord of the manor 
bochef If he were, why had he left his uniforms behind? 
Why was his wife accommodating the French Army by 
housing its visitors so handsomely? We went to the ban- 
quet sorely puzzled. 

Headquarters House was another such structure as the 
one where we were quartered, with a big paneled dining- 
room where about twenty of us sat down to a royal feast. 
It was not that the dinner was so extraordinarily elaborate 
as that the cooking was perfection, the wines excellent, the 
taste epicurean. My place was between the Major-Mayor, 
who is not only commanding officer of the troops, but civil 
administrator and judge of the district, and a charming 
young Blue Devil. There were other Blue Devils, or Chas- 
seurs Alpins — those amazing mountain riflemen who are 
inured to every hardship and who wear as their proud 
insignia the rakish, slouching heret instead of the regular 
Army Jcepi — artillery both heavy and light, Staff, infantry 
and engineers around that table. The small talk waxed 
fast and furious of everything under the sun but the war. 
It might have been a private dinner at the Eitz-Carleton 
in either New York or London. Music, art, poetry, the 
ethics of insisting that a West Point cadet should learn to 
dance to make him able to handle balky soldiers, the age of 
a certain ogival window in the town hall, President Wil- 
son's sense of humor! They all came in for lively discus- 
sion, and I lamented the inability of the French language 
to render the delightful slang of the limerick the President 



222 WITH THKEE AEMIES 

is said to have quoted with hearty appreciation. But how 
could the ablest French scholar Gallicize "It's the folks 
out in front that I jar ¥' 

Only when the Major-Mayor and I fell to discussing 
Alsace did the banter cease, and the big table listen as the 
commander warmed to his favorite theme. In crisp*, bril- 
liant French, his face flushing with his earnestness and his 
eyes two lambent flames, he swept the dishes from before 
him impatiently, and built an Alsace out of nutshells and 
crumbs and wine glasses, explaining, criticizing, lecturing. 
Our Staff Captain leaned forward in his place across the 
table and listened like a schoolboy hearing Gunga Din for 
the first time. 

"Mon Dieu — the stupidity of the boche!" cried the 
Major-Mayor, demolishing a nutshell mountain that had 
represented Hartmannsweilerkopf an instant before. "Bah ! 
To declare this stupid war and risk his national life! In 
ten, perhaps at the most, twenty years, he would have 
owned the world. His commerce was everywhere. He 
knew everything. His gold was buying him everything. 
Nobody was awake. Nothing could have stopped him if 
he had only been satisfied to go on in the same way. When 
we awoke, we should all have been his slaves — France, 
England, Italy, Eussia. Yes, America, too, Monsieur. 
Your country suffers from the boche plague even yet ! But 
he was born with the sword in his hand. He loved its 
rattle in the scabbard. He had to use it. He could not 
wait. Madness seized him for blood. He must drink it, 



TN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 223 

bathe in it, wallow in it. So he struck — and lost every- 
thing — but blood. He has had that. Mom Dieu, he has 
had that !" 

A growl ran around the table. "So have we, mon Com- 
mandant!" exploded a pale, thin little Chasseur — the 
hardiest and most daring of them all, I learned afterward. 

Another growl answered him, but the Major-Mayor 
waved it down. "We have," he assented gravely. "But 
Alsace is worth it. I speak to you, Monsieur," he went on, 
turning directly to me, "not only as an Alsatian but as a 
Frenchman. You know a little of our tiny country. You 
have seen and will see more of its beauty and its wealth. 
Perhaps you know enough of its dark story to understand 
why we Alsatians love it, and why, also, we love France. 
France never stole us from Germany, because there was no 
Germany in Louis XIV's time to steal us from ! She got 
us by treaty from the House of Austria in 1648. But that 
was a long time ago. "We learned to love the French char- 
acter, the French spirit. It struck a responsive chord in 
our hearts. Voila — we became French — more French than 
the Frenchman! Is it not so, gentlemen?" 

The table chorused thunderous approval of his rendering 
of history. "So!" continued the Major-Mayor, making 
a heap of his built-up crumbs and shells again and pouring 
them into his champagne glass. "When we drive Germany 
out of Alsace, we are not stealing territory. Mon Dieu — we 
are simply forcing a thief to disgorge what he had stolen 
from France in 1871 ! Germany has tried to deceive 



224 WITH THREE ARMIES 

France and the world with nonsense about Alsace. She 
has tried to deceive us Alsatians again and again. Wasted 
effort ! We obeyed her because behind her orders were 
prison and death at the most, and petty martyrdom at the 
very least. But think you Germany by harsh measures, by 
stupidity, by coercion and brutalities, could change in forty 
years the sentiments that had been growing for more than 
two centuries?" 

"But, Major, what about the plebiscite? Would not that 
decide once and forever whether Alsace is really French? 
What fairer way could there be than letting the Alsatians 
themselves say whether they wish to be a German crown- 
land or whatever it may be, or French ?" 

To a man the officers reproved me with one short, definite 
glance; then each one looked back at his plate or at his 
opposite. Only the Major-Mayor smiled. 

"Ah, Monsieur, you test me. No way could be fairer if 
Germany would let the Alsatians decide. But the pleb- 
iscite ! Mon Bieu, Monsieur, no plebiscite is possible ! 
There are 250,000 Alsatians who have been forced into the 
ooclie armies; 250,000 more are no longer Alsations be- 
cause they have fled to France and are now Frenchmen. 
There are half a million votes disqualified at once. And 
don't forget that 400,000 Germans have been worked into 
Alsace as immigrants. Even supposing Germany herself 
meant well, do you suppose those individual Germans could 
fail to intimidate the Alsatians? Do you suppose that an 
honest vote would be possible? Remember the wealth of 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 225 

Alsace-Lorraine: the timber and phosphate here; the tre- 
mendous mineral riches of Lorraine. Germany will never 
give up this wealth until she is forced to at the point of 
the sword ! What she stole, she will hold. It is for us to 
beat her to her knees and make her let go. And/' he 
summed up triumphantly, bringing his clenched fist down 
until the glasses leaped with his fervor, "when we win 
back the iron mines of Lorraine, the hoche can never make 
war on this scale again because he will not have the re- 
sources for making guns where he must have them — inside 
his own borders !" 

"We had our coffee and liqueurs in the adjoining salon, 
and the talk drifted into less pleasant channels. A Captain 
beside me was glancing idly over a German photograph 
album filled with heavy Teutonic children, and blubbery 
personages full of beer and wind and whisker. "Fancy !" 
he startled me by saying in perfect English. "We French 
have not hurt one thing in this house, though it was owned 
by Germans. We even look over their photograph albums 
with smiles, and keep the wretched piano tuned. We are 
so simple, so droll. The hoche does more cunning things." 

"Cunning things?" the Major-Mayor repeated slowly, 
his face darkening. "I do not speak much English, but 
enough to know what you mean. I should not call them 
cunning. . . ." 

The Captain laughed. It was a laugh that made me 
shiver. His handsome face contorted into a smile that 
drew up his lips at the corners and showed the strong white 



226 "WITH THEEE ARMIES 

teeth, but his eyes smoldered like the spark at the end of 
a burning fuse. 

"But, my Major," he protested, dropping into liquid 
Erench, "they are so chic. Their sense of humor is so fine ! 

You remember the house at E , where the officers had 

their dinner, and after they finished smashed everything 
in the place but the dishes on the table, and the eighteen 
or twenty wine glasses they used as latrines and set in a 
row on the mantelpiece for us to find? Dieu!" 

The Major-Mayor's florid face was purple. He nodded 
slowly, his hands clenching and unclenching as he mur- 
mured, so softly I could hardly hear him: "Oui, out — - 
chic!" Across the room his eye caught the glance of an 
infantry Captain and summoned him over. "Mon vieux, 

have you the pictures of that Lieutenant H who was 

shot near Mulhouse? The one who had the big pocket- 
book?" 

"Not here, my Major," was the answer. "I am sorry, if 
you want them. I sent them to Paris. . . " 

"Never mind," his superior replied; and to me: "The 
chic boche — I am sorry you could not have been with us 
when we found him. He was a brave fellow, and when he 
was shot in a skirmish, Captain, here, examined his body 
to remove the identity disc and his papers, to send them to 
his family. In his breast pocket was a great wallet, almost 
a portfolio. In one side of it he had letters from his wife 
and children, pictures of them; beautiful letters full of 
love and tenderness; beautiful pictures; an unfinished let- 



IN THE BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS 227 

ter lie had been writing to his wife — a good letter, too. In 
the other he had gathered a collection of the most obscene 
verses and photographs imaginable. There they were, face 
to face, over his heart. And he went into action, knowing 
he might be shot, and those things found on his dead body ! 
Ah, ces chic bodies!" 

By this time half the room had gathered around us, and 
our Staff Captain murmured a suggestion into the Major- 
Mayor's scarlet ear. He hesitated, looked at us foreigners 
— assented. To a splendid young Chasseur Lieutenant he 
made a signal. The young man, already scowling with his 
memory, looked doubly fierce as the words poured forth in 
a torrent. He, at least, had no hesitancy in telling the 
world what horror he had seen, what helpless shame. He 
spoke directly to us Americans, swiftly, in low, earnest 
tones, acting his story as he told it with strong gestures and 
expressions, his voice penetrating our very souls with its 
clear, vibrant emotion. 

"It is not much — only one of hundreds of such cases, no 
doubt, but I saw it, and I had the satisfaction of playing 
executioner. Only, mon Dieu, I was too late to save the 
poor child. . . . ! 

"The boche had captured a hamlet. On its outskirts 
stood a comfortable bourgeois home. It was the type you 
know so well — square — four rooms on the ground floor — a 
central hallway, two rooms to right, two to left. The din- 
ing-room was in front. It was night. We crept up on it, 
choked the videttes and sent them to the rear. I called my 



228 WITH THBEE ARMIES 

men together again. We stole up closer. The windows had 
not been shaded. We could look straight into the dining- 
room. 

"Tied in their chairs sat the father and mother, one at 
each end of the room. A German soldier with fixed bayonet 
stood at each side of the door, looking on and grinning. 
The bocJie officer had jerked the cloth from the table. 
Everything lay in a heap on the floor. On the table he had 
flung the daughter of the house, and he — mon Dieu! I shot 
him there. ... I could not wait to capture him — !" 



.CHAPTER XV 



ALSACE AND ITS PROBLEMS 



From my window, opened wide at eleven o'clock, when 
the banquet was over and I stood in my darkened room 
still sick at heart, the mountains loomed black and forbid- 
ding in the background. They seemed the visible mani- 
festation of Germany's heavy baseness, closing around poor 
little Alsace in a cold, sinister, unsurmountable barrier. 
In the sky behind, soft as black velvet, the stars winked and 
paled intermittently to the flashes of distant guns, whose 
dull shock came faintly, very faintly, from the other side 
of the hills, eleven kilometers away. Below me Massevaux 
was absolutely black and formless, save where some incau- 
tious spirit had failed to draw his curtains perfectly, and 
a chink of light made the surrounding blackness all the 
more Stygian. 

Morning brought us a tremendous, German-style break- 
fast of ham, sausage, liver and eggs that would have turned 
the coffee-and-rolls stomach of any Frenchman, and a hasty 
survey of the town before we resumed our voyage de luxe 
sur automobile. Massevaux is typical of most Alsatian vil- 
lages, with its central square decorated by a not unpleasing 
fountain and monument, its signs of inns and shops thrust 
out at right angles from the walls to silhouette their quaint 

229 



230 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

figures of rising suns and red bears and white horses against 
the blue morning sky. The houses are all snub-nosed, the 
streets mostly narrow and none too light, but well paved 
and clean. Already the old German signs had been hastily 
painted out on most of the shops, and their windows dis- 
played the tricolor and the Stars and Stripes everywhere. 
America may be a name only, but it is certainly a name to 

conjure with in Alsace. I thought of Signor S 's dictum 

about "Cooking it" along the front as we stared like children 
into the strange shop windows, full of dolls in the Alsatian 
costume of tight black-laced bodice, white stockings, scarlet 
skirt and huge black bow for the hair; monstrous German 
stoves built up of ornamental porcelain plaques, side by side 
with little sheet-iron "chunk-burners" so flimsy they 
hardly seemed stoves at all; postcards, patent medicines, 
gnarly looking fruit; bags of "grains of cereals" and hard- 
ware; while from the wet black interiors of the cafes came 
sounds of scrubbing and splashes of dirty water as the 
barkeeper-proprietors made ready for the day's trade. 

Here and there beside the tricolor hung the scarlet- 
and-white of Strasbourg, chosen as the Alsatian flag when 
the province was seized in 1871. If the people had to fly 
the hated red-white-black of Germany, at least, they in- 
sisted, they must have colors all their own; and they did. 
"We found an echo of their enduring spirit in a tiny photo- 
graph and postcard shop on the main street. The pro- 
prietor, very "boche-lookmg" as he said himself, was over- 
joyed to see some more Americans. He gave us a voluble 



ALSACE AND ITS PEOBLEMS 231 

lecture on Alsatian history which would have made the 
editors of the printed histories rub their eyes, sketched the 
petty persecutions of the past forty years, and explained 
that he had had not only to pronounce his name — it was 
Edouard Bommer — in German fashion — but, for the sake 
of his growing daughter, had had to be German. If he had 
not been so careful, "so. boche," in a word, the girl would 
have paid and his business been ruined. 

"But now," he cried, slapping my companion so heartily 
on the shoulder it nearly capsized him into a counter full of 
dolls and postcards, "we are safe. "We are French again! 
My daughter is in Paris to-day, buying goods for me. 
Voila !" He fumbled near-sightedly among the picture post- 
cards and presented each of us with the likeness of a pretty 
young Alsacienne in costume. "This is my petite, gentle- 
men. I beg of you, accept this little souvenir. You may 
well wish she were here, instead of her stupid old father, 
to make you welcome to our Alsace." 

We accepted the cards, and when I suggested that it was 
rash to have pictures of his own daughter on sale in public, 
he grew apoplectic. 

"In German days — mon Dieu, non ! Never such a thing ! 
The first officer who saw would have said just — 'Bring her 
put!' But now — did I not say, 'We are French now?' " 

As we brought our grips downstairs in the p'tit chateau 
that had been our very delightful quarters, we wondered 
again about those German uniforms in the big washroom. 
Our curiosity was satined with one of those lightning-flasE 



232 WITH THREE ARMIES 

glimpses into the heart of another that are so startling. 
Madame proved to be } r oung and charming. She regretted 
her absence of the previous evening gracefully, and ex- 
changed the usual compliments with her strange and some- 
what awkward cavaliers. As we were leaving, my companion 
ventured a fortunate word of good wishes for Monsieur the 
absent. Madame's eyes flashed and her hands flew to her 
breast. She made a pretty picture, framed in the dark 
oaken doorway, a pot of yellow flowers at her feet and the 
sun glinting in her golden hair and blue eyes. 

"Safe !" she breathed, almost in a whisper. "He is a 
soldier. I wish him safe, but first I wish him his duty !" 
She flinched a little under our scrutiny, added more slowly : 
"If he must die, I hope it is in battle. If only they do not 
catch him !" 

There was something so tragic, so pregnant in the pro- 
noun we both jumped. I exclaimed : "They, Madame ?" 

She came a step forward, her blue eyes violet with 
emotion. 

"Did you not know ? Did no one tell you of him ? Until 
1914 he was an officer in the German regiment sta- 
tioned here, a Major. He had to be; every one had to, to 
be safe — to keep his home safe. When the war came, he" 
— she stumbled a little over the ugly word, even though 
spoken in a good cause — "deserted. He fled to enlist in a 
French regiment. He was made a Lieutenant only — he, a 
Major! He is fighting somewhere here, at the front. To 
die for France is good. But" — those palpitating hands flew 




Alsatian girl in native costume 



ALSACE AND ITS PKOBLEMS 233 

to her heart again — "if the bodies, who know him, catch 
him . . .!" 

The ex-Major's ease is that of unnumbered thousands of 
other Alsatians, loyal to the last drop of their blood to 
their beloved France, but compelled — even more for the 
safety of their families than themselves — to pretend, dur- 
ing the long night of Teutonic misrule, to be German. The 
natural consequence, once the French won their way into 
Alsace, was suspicion everywhere. Who could be sure of 
anything when the Alsatians freely admitted having posed 
as German to save themselves? What was there to show 
that the loyalty and friendship they now offered their 
French liberators was not mere lip-service, ready to stab 
the benefactor in the back at the first opportunity? It 
made a tense and delicate situation which perhaps no 
nation in the world could handle so adequately as the 
French. For overt suspicion and hasty condemnation, they 
substituted suavity and tact; for brutal directness they 
employed ceaseless vigilance and secret scrutiny. Courtesy 
and graciousness replaced shouldering and cursing and 
saber-rattling. Who can doubt the result ? 

[The logical Frenchman knows how easy it is for a man 
to be nominally loyal, without being sincerely a patriot; 
how slight a thing can turn such indifferent allegiance into 
active treason. Here a man whom the French troops had 
accidentally despoiled of a pig, for example, might continue 
to be a loyalist if recompensed under the German laws to 
which he was accustomed, even though the verdict be not 



234 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

entirely satisfactory; conversely, if his case be decided by 
a military or even a civil tribunal working under French 
laws as yet Greek to him, he might turn his back upon 
France and wish himself once more governed by the very 
people whose ways he hated. So French rule in Alsace has 
progressed very cautiously. The courts still use the German 
law the people understand; the Army officers acting as 
judges and court officials act not as soldiers, under military 
regulation, but as civil officials solely. The Army, too, has 
made it clear to the Alsatians that the reason they are not 
fighting more furiously and winning back Alsace more 
quickly, is that they do not wish to smash up the towns 
more than can be helped. In a word, everything possible is 
being done, and in the gentlest possible way, to show the 
ignorant among this timid-fiery, obstinate-easily-led people 
that France loves them as her favorite children and wishes 
them only good. And Alsace is responding heartily. 
French courtesy tinctures the peasant bluntness, and wher- 
ever one goes the lifted hat and the cheery greeting speak 
volumes in themselves, while over the whole region is an 
atmosphere of contentment and happiness that is a joy 
to feel. 

We parted from Madame and her delightful house with 
regret — and five minutes later forgot her completely in the 
beauty of the meadows, sprinkled thick with lavender cro- 
cuses. France and Italy have their red bonneted poppies, 
scarlet spirits of the soil. But in September Alsace has her 
mantle of almost royal purple, in May her cloth of gold; 



ALSACE AKD ITS PEOBLEMS 235 

the same flowers, but m&mbile dictu! golden in spring, 
lavender in the fall. They illuminated the fields for whole 
acres, seeming to catch and bring to earth something of the 
smiling skies above them. And then a swift turn, and we 
rolled past a vast aerodrome where, despite my pleadings, 
we were not allowed to stop; in fact, the motors speeded 
a little going by, and we merely caught a fleeting glimpse 
of the hornets' nest: the great green hangars, the broad, 
flat field, the wicked little fighting planes marshaled in 
serried rows in the open, ready to take instant wing when 
the telephone jingled. Silvery white they gleamed in the 
morning sunshine, with the big red-white-blue circles 
painted on wings and tail that proclaimed their national- 
ity and saved them from the defending guns. 

The air was moist and cool, aromatic with balsam as we 
flew along the white road winding up into the hills through 
the ever thickening forests of dark sapins, to the point at 
which the new Eoute Joffre, constructed since the war 
began for military purposes, branches away from the old 
roads and leads into the mountain fastnesses where the 
guns make music among the whispering trees. And what 
a road that is, to climb in limousines whose tremendous 
weight made the engines labor until the radiators boiled 
over furiously. The car I was in had to stop a dozen times 
to cool off before taking the next terrific grade ! 

Like the thing that created it — war — the Eoute Joffre is 
mostly red, carved and hewn and built up through clay and 
shale. Here it mounts in sharp zigzags and hairpin turns 



236 WITH THREE ARMIES 

that fairly take one's breath and give even the hardiest of 
motorists pause. I myself have driven over some very dif- 
ficult mountain roads in America, but never had I seen a 
twenty-eight per cent, grade before — with a hairpin turn 
in it, a sheer precipice on one side, a sheer cliff on the other, 
and so little space the panting motor had to take half the 
turn and then risk a fall from the sticky, slippery road by 
sliding back and slewing as it slid, to negotiate the rest of 
the turn ! That morning Signor S and I had a car to- 
gether. He yawned occasionally, or consulted a bottle of 
dyspepsia medicine. When I tried to stir his interest, he 
replied : "I've been over the telef ericas, 14,000 feet above 
nothing. This is just a bad road!" I gave him up after 
that, and hugged the wonder of it to myself. 

The flanks of Stauffen stopped us, the machines backed 
into a niche hewn from the abrupt face of the cliff, and we 
started to climb the trail for the "near" front. The cool 
old forest was damp and quiet, save for the occasional bark 
of a squirrel or the note of a bird. Ferns and moss under- 
foot made a soft carpet but hard climbing, and we were 
glad to emerge at last upon a rocky little grass plot at the 
brow of the hill, fringed at the edge with enough small 
trees and shoots to conceal us from the prying German 
eyes in the plain below. When, however, for the sake of a 
broader view, we stood for a moment in an oriole-like open- 
ing through the forest growth, the artillery observers no 
doubt telephoned back to their guns within a second or 
two : "Staff officers and party of three at K 96, section 3, 



ALSACE AND ITS PROBLEMS 237 

Stauffen. Two in uniform, two civilians/' We moved into 
cover, and no shells came over in our exact direction; not, 
as our Staff Captain said, that the boche did not wish to 
kill ns, but because he could not trace the fall of his shells 
accurately for the wood. "Don't imagine he doesn't see 

you P' he warned, as Signor S went back into the open 

and silhouetted himself clearly against the sky while he 
studied the panorama below with his binoculars. When he 
was ready, the Italian came into shelter again, with a sig- 
nificant look to me. 

From our height we looked down to the left upon the 
quaintest and loveliest of old Alsatian mountain towns, 
Vieux Thann, or Thann the Old, a dark bluish-gray and 
dull red huddle of roofs and spires lying motionless at the 
feet of the blue hills. A little farther out, New Thann — 
held by the boche — rubricked the sunny landscape in some- 
what brighter colors. Straight before us the plain swept 
away flat as a Texas prairie for miles. In the foreground 
was Cerny, the nearest German strongpoint. Empty high- 
road, and railroad where no locomotive smoked, no cars rat- 
tled, shot straight out into the hazy distance, with tall 
poplars and other slender trees piping them with green. 
Here and there compact farms, with low, red-tiled houses 
and walled compounds sentineled by trees and shrubs, 
dotted the warscape. Yonder a dense grove, well behind the 
German lines, stood darkly forbidding and mysterious. A 
hamlet boasting a large insane asylum bulked big in the 
middle distance. Far off toward the edge of things loomed 



238 WITH THREE ARMIES 

the great Forest of rTonnenbruch, and behind that, a low- 
lying fog-bank that hid Sentheim and Mulhouse, the Rhine 
and the Black Forest and the Jura itself from even the 
sharpest eyes. But on days when the atmosphere is clear, 
the sparkling ribbon of the Rhine looks very close, and the 
Schwarzwald as black and impressive on its farther bank, 
under the floating white and indigo crown of the half- 
imagined mountain, as the fairy tales have always made it. 
Cutting this lovely panorama squarely in two from right 
to left in a series of rough zigzags lay the front, the fire 
trenches, French and do die. Twisty ripples of communica- 
tion trench meandered off behind from either side ; and be- 
tween the lines, a long, narrow, yellow strip of dead grass 
and desolation bordered by barbed wire — No Man's Land. 
Here was a real front, something to stir the imagination, 
something that looked like war; we could even see down 
into the rearward of the three lines of French trenches, and 
with our glasses at times distinguish moving figures. An 
occasional shell from a six- or eight-inch gun far in the 
rear, landed somewhere out of our sight with a dull Plop! 
curiously flat and emotionless compared with its eerie 
shriek as it flew through the air, over the heads of the un- 
concerned farmers, who calmly raked and stacked their hay 
directly behind the French lines. "Cool nerve" is a phrase 
so abused it has long since lost most of its meaning for our 
sensation-glutted minds. But those sweating Alsatian peas- 
ants who gave no heed to the slow bombardment above 
them, had the coolest nerve I ever saw. 



ALSACE AND ITS PKOBLEMS 239 

Close to us in an 0. P. partly underground and partly 
tunneled through a dense thicket, unwinking French eyes 
kept ceaseless watch upon the German lines, and in a little 
secret nest of its own a big French gun slept with one eye 
open, commanding trenches and plain for miles when it 
chose to open its black lips and thrust forth its dragon 
tongue. It was not speaking that day ; neither were any of 
the German guns within its reach. Indeed, since the furi- 
ous combats which wrested Hartmannsweilerkopf from the 
German hands, the lines have been very nearly stationary. 
Commanding the plain from the heights they now control, 
the French could easily blast the Germans out of their 
trenches and rush them back a few miles. But if they did 
that, the Germans would naturally retaliate by blasting the 
two Thanns and Cerny off the map — and the French do 
not wish to have any greater damage wrought in Alsace 
than is absolutely imperative; not only because damage is 
costly to repair, but also because of the moral effect upon 
the Alsatians. To smash up towns and obliterate farms and 
property is not the most diplomatic method of winning the 
affection and regard of even a people who consider them- 
selves the national children of the avenger. The Germans, 
on their part, do not wish to smash up what they consider 
German property; consequently the fight in Alsace goes 
by fits and starts when it goes, and for the most part is a 
stand-off. 

Farther north, where our troops have entered a sector 
in Lorraine and made it lively, the same thing may hap- 



240 WITH THREE ARMIES 

pen that occurred up in Belgium, in a region where the 
Canadians took vigorous hold. Until they came, the gen- 
eral situation had been fairly quiet. After they had been 
there a few months, if you said "Canadian" to a Belgian 
of that vicinity, he would swear or spit. If you asked him 
why, he would wave his hand comprehensively at the deso- 
lation the Germans had made in reply to the Canadian of- 
fensives. "These damned Canadians ! Until they came, we 
had homes. Look at things now l" 

Why must the generous French in all cases insist on 
Staff Officers and time limits for visitors? At the actual 
front, of course, that rule is not only quite proper but abso- 
lutely essential for anything but the work the daily cable 
men do. But at a quiet place like Vieux Thann, for in- 
stance, why could they not let us sit down for a day or so, 
to browse and dream, to scrape acquaintance with the peo- 
ple, and to make coherent notes ? I spoke of it to our genial 
conductor. " 'Inter arma silent leges' " he quoted, smiling. 
"It would be all right in some places and with some men ; 
but unfortunately not even all correspondents can be 
trusted to display discretion — and this is war." I inter- 
preted to Signor S , and all the rest of the afternoon he 

kept chuckling to himself in Italian: "It is war! It is 
war !" 

Our stop in Old Thann was merely an aggravation, 
though we had time before luncheon to see its beautiful 
church, an ancient Gothic structure, very tall, with a tre- 
mendously high-pitched ornamental slate roof, above which 



ALSACE AND ITS PEOBLEMS 241 

the spire rockets upward, slender and graceful as a budding 
hollyhock. One of the innumerable Alsatian proverbs 
clings to this spire — 

Le docker de Strasbourg est le plus haut 3 
\Celui de Fribourg est le plus gros, 
Celui de Thann est le plus beau! 

Strasbourg's spire is vast and tall; 

Friburg's largest much of all; 
But Thann's, though not so great or high, 

The loveliest is beneath the shy! 

The interior of the church is very odd and interesting, 
quite different from the pure Gothic, the lofty-groined nave 
flanked to north and south with wide side chapels between 
the buttresses. The windows have vanished under the pres- 
sure of war, most of them f rappees by concussion, some re- 
moved, all replaced with plain muslin fastened by wooden 
slats. The result is that the nave, which must have been 
very dark before, is now unusually light, and even the side 
chapels are completely visible. The different tablets posted 
on the pillars, representing the Stations of the Cross, form 
an illuminating commentary on the German spirit. Every 
line of them is in German lettering and German text, in- 
stead of the customary Latin. While we were looking 
around, children who had followed us in, inquired of my 
American companion, whose gray hair and pleasant smile 

gave them confidence, whether Signor S , whose faded 

uniform they distrusted, might not be some kind of a 
bo die! 



242 WITH THKEE AEMIES 

At luncheon we decided against going into the fire 
trenches on Hartmannsweilerkopf, though the Captain told 
us we might; but we could go in only at night, and we 
should have to stay in the sector we entered until the fol- 
lowing night. None of us wished to lose a whole day in 
such close and uncomfortable quarters, and the alternative 
suggested, of climbing the much higher Mulkenrain, and 
looking down upon Hartmann' — so the French abbreviate 
it much of the time — seemed more promising. 

Once more on the Eoute Joffre, we ran swiftly up 
through the valley of Thann, past an old Crusaders' castle 
on a peak above the town, to Bitschweiler, and thence, by 
a soft, dangerous road where the white signs at the steep- 
est grades read "18 Pour Cent" "22 Pour Cent" and once 
"28 Pour €ent" to the rond-point for automobiles. Thence, 
with one of the artillery officers from the crest of the moun- 
tain as our local mentor, we climbed the road, we climbed 
steep, zigzag gun-paths, we climbed a mere trail among 
trees, many a one shot in two without injury to its imme- 
diate neighbors. How was it possible for any shell to come 
sailing through that dense pine wood and hit only one tree ? 

"When we emerged on top of the Mulkenrain, almost 
3,700 feet above the sea, we found ourselves shut in com- 
pletely by the wettest, most blinding fog I ever saw on land. 
It lay in great banks that rolled and turned on one another 
like vast woolen blankets, it cut off the treetops below us, 
it made the steady booming of the artillery around Gerbe- 
villers, or Gerbweiler, sound muffled and hollow. We sat 



ALSACE AND ITS PROBLEMS 243 

down on the wet grass and listened to war stories while we 
waited, on the chance that the fog might lift. The artillery 
Captain, a young Alsatian with pink cheeks and golden 
hair and a blue eye grown hard and cold as a bayonet, told 
us dramatically of the fighting that had wrested the in- 
visible Hartmann' from the hoche. Verdun itself witnessed 
no finer, loftier courage, no more desperate conflict. There 
was something epic in the simplicity and directness of that 
account of the months of furious combat up and over the 
mountain top, where France forced back Germany inch by 
inch over rocks incarnadined with the choicest ichor of 
her Army, and the forests fell away tree by tree until 
naught was left on that battered peak but one disabled 
survivor. 

And then the fog began to lift. There it was — the lone 
pine on the very summit of Hartmannsweilerkopf, almost 
six hundred feet below us and half a mile across the little 
valley, tearing the blanket to ribbons ! Presently it stood 
clear, a single beheaded tree, its two shattered arms ex- 
tended in piteous appeal, on a tiny, absolutely desolated 
island, with the white surf beating about on every side. 
That was all. Impenetrability closed over it. But perhaps 
the fog would lift again. We waited an hour — two hours. 
The four o'clock sun called, and all of a sudden the fog rose 
in a solid bank, collapsed upon itself, doubled back, and 
there was the entire mountain, shaggy as a satyr below, its 
crown covered with boulders, seamed with ragged furrows, 
thorny with short, jagged stumps — and that one, terrible 



244 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

tree, tortured and riven, trie ghastly monument to the val- 
ient souls who had stood like the trees about them to be 
mowed down by the iron blasts. 

Down the valley, where the fog still clung, an aeroplane 
went up. We heard the hollow purr of his gun- — a French- 
man. A moment later came a slower fusillade — put! -put !- 
put! -put! It was for all the world like a pneumatic riveter 
on a New York skyscraper on a thick day. And then the 
sharp bark of a "Seventy-seven." The bodies were after our 
French friend. The battery was very close — the shattering 
eclat of the long shell seemed directly overhead. The aero- 
plane duel kept steadily on; other anti-aircraft guns, rifles 
and mitrailleuses joined the chorus, and we scattered to 
various vantage points. I stepped up on a low stone wall, 
and peered steadily into the mists. Suddenly all around I 
heard somebody slapping bits of board together — claclc!- 
clacJc !-clach ! 

I looked around — not a sign of anything ! The noises in- 
creased in vigor and frequency. They became a small 
storm. I stood quite still, listening and watching. A star- 
tled cry from behind made me turn cautiously on my pre- 
carious perch. Our artillery Captain was racing toward me 
over the rock-sprinkled grass, shouting : 

"Get down ! Get down ! Take cover \" 

I jumped from the wall and slipped behind a tree just 
as he came dodging up to me, his face flushed, his eyes se- 
vere. 

"Why do you expose yourself?" he demanded tartly. 



ALSACE AND ITS PROBLEMS 245 

"Don't you know machine-gun fire when you hear it all 
around you?" 

It took me a moment to get my breath. "Well, no," I 
answered. "I've stood behind it often enough, but I never 
was in front before. Were they potting at us ?" 

"At us!" he exclaimed. "No! Monsieur, those were 
spent balls, falling harmlessly from heaven !" He caught 
himself up sharply, changed tone and manner. "I think 
we shall do well to keep out of sight, sir. You have seen 
Hartmann', anyway." 

Down the Mulkenrain we plunged and staggered and 
slid — graceful as marionettes — making harder work of the 
descent than of the climb, and providing amusement for 
the artillerists who greeted us cheerily from their camoufle 
barrack, half-dugout, half-rustic-summerhouse. And then 
the motors, "conserving" the precious essence by running 
on gravity, skidded down those frightful grades and angles 
to Bitschweiler and on to Thann, where we had a royal din- 
ner served amid joyous clamor in a little hotel with care- 
fully darkened windows and doors, by an Alsacienne with 
the figure and face of a Juno, a radiant smile, and the as- 
tonishing appellation of Phinele. 

The genuineness of the French Army's democracy ap- 
peared when a young Chasseur private whom our American 
companion knew, was invited to dine with us. His fellows 
drank a roaring toast to "Jean's capable stomach" as he, 
distinctly abashed by the presence of our Staff Captain, 
came over and sat down. The evening went off with a 



246 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

merry swing amid clouds of cigarette smoke and a deal of 
noise — toasts, singing, rough soldier jokes and banter of 
the Junoesque Phineie. If this sounds bacchic, the fault is 
mine. "When it was all over, everybody had tucked away 
about two glasses apiece of the very mild local wine. Your 
true Frenchman does not need alcohol to fire his powdery 
gaiety and sense of humor: he can wax genial over dried 
f rogVlegs in the trenches under fire ! 

We motored up to Kruth by night, running without 
Headlights, as the road was in view of the German observers 
most of the distance. "Going it blind" on a fine, unten- 
anted highway is all very well, but there was some psycho- 
logical discomfort in swooping around those silent turns 
and darting through the high-walled tunnels of murmur- 
ous trees among which a boche shell might tear its way at 
any moment. The discomfort became very real as a sharp 
challenge suddenly halted the first of our cars so unex- 
pectedly we almost ran into it. A French sentry at its 
door held his bayonet at the charge. 

"What do you mean by running past a sentry?" he de- 
manded. 

"Sentry !" repeated our Captain. "Where ?" 

"A hundred meters back. He challenged, and you ran by 
him. Now I have you. Passez-moi le mot!" 

"Mon Dieu!" cried the Captain. "I haven't the pass- 
word ! I forgot to get it !" 

"You get out and come with me. We'll see about that," 
retorted the sentry. 



ALSACE AND ITS PEOBLEMS 247 

Captain A came out of that car in more of a hurry 

than I had ever seen him exhibit before. The sentry kept 
his eye on him and called to another guard to hold the rest 
of us while he took his prisoner to the corporal. 

"You were lucky the fellow didn't blow your head off/' 
that worthy grumbled. "If it had been near Verdun, or 
along the Somme — !" 

"It was close enough for me," murmured the Captain 
afterward as he told us of what had happened in the dark 
little hut where the corporal sat. 

We made a great loop all around the recovered region, 
through picturesque old towns all with the same high color 
and charm, "over the hills and far away," and came to rest 
at last back in a Belfort hotel at the very moment the siren 
on the Fortress began to bellow and the guns on the out- 
skirts began to pop. We rushed out into the main square 
where we could see the fort, as well as the sky. People 
gathered in knots in the streets and stared upward. 

"Oof! Driven off!" exclaimed our Captain, as a Chas- 
seur bugler mounted the steps of the monument to the 
heroes of '70, and blew the beautiful call announcing that 
clanger was over. We turned back to the hotel and lunch- 
eon. Three times we heard the message of peace repeated, 
in different quarters of the city, before we reached the 
hotel — and while we were in the midst of our soup the 
siren began to bellow again. 

"AlerteT said the Captain, suspending his spoon for an 



248 WITH THREE AEMIES 

instant. Then he went calmly on with his meal, and we 
could do no less. 

Belfort has no fear of the boche flying men, even though 
they come by day and fly low enough to turn their machine- 
guns down the streets. On Monday of the week we were 
there they killed sixteen dogs; on Tuesday, eighteen. 
Wednesday they did better — a baby in its mother's arms 
and an officer of the garrison. At the same time they 
bombed a little, blowing a hole in the pavement in front of 
our hotel, all of whose windows were broken. Yet Belfort, 
mindful of its heroic standard of 1870, goes calmly on 
about its business. The big sign on the facade of the hotel 
— CAVE! Refuge en cos de Bombardement. 60 Per- 
sonnes. (Cellar: Refuge for 60 persons during bombard- 
ments) — called no one in when the alert e blew. The stran- 
ger would not have known anything was amiss save for the 
groups who gazed skyward. 

The mountains of Alsace are not very lofty, not espe- 
cially impressive peaks as great mountains go, but they are 
supremely lovely, and when the war is over, the Route 
Joffre and the fine new Route Rationale, which skips like 
a chamois from peak to wooded peak, will be the resort of 
every traveler with a motor. The vistas from these blue 
hills are blue and green and silver below, azure and silver 
above: the Vosges themselves, the distant Alps, the head- 
waters of the Moselle, the exquisite little Lac de Sewen 
from which it flows, the far-off Rhine and Germany, the 
dazzling skies. From the little observatory on the top of 



ALSACE AND ITS PKOBLEMS 249 

the Ballon d' Alsace, the highest of all the peaks, with its 
brass-topped stone wall marked by direction arrows, we 
looked away over all these, over the lonely fortress npon 
the hnge Ballon de Servance, and down npon Belfort, shin- 
ing in cool summer sunshine far below in the plain. 

It was a prospect to make one think, that circular view 
along the roof of the world: France — giving her treasure 
and blood for Alsace; lovely, virginal Alsace, chained like 
Andromeda, waiting the deliverance of a new Perseus. The 
world-public has not yet wakened to the importance of the 
region; it listens in honest confusion to the lying propa- 
ganda Germany is still assiduously spreading to cloud the 
issue and weaken the Allies' determination that right shall 
be done. It will be done ! France has sworn her oath, the 
leaders of British thought have pledged themselves, and 
America has taken her stand beside them officially, despite 
the ignorance and indifference of most Americans. So, 
through an immediate future as uncertain as the haze 
which made the vista quiver that sunny morning from the 
top of the Ballon, Alsace waits, and hopes, impatient now 
that her long slavery's end is near, but confident of the 
Liberie, Egalite, Fraternite she sees dawning over the blue 
shoulders of her bounding hills. 



CHAPTER XVI 

A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 

C'est a rire — It is to laugh ! 

But how could auy nation so hard pressed by war as 
France manage a laugh? On the other hand, how could 
she do anything else? Certainly had she looked only on 
the darker side, kept her mind fixed upon the horrors she 
was and is going through, France would quickly have gone 
as mad as the Bolsheviki, instead of sanely, wisely planning 
and working always with the one great end in view: the 
vital after-war reeonstitution of people and country. 

At first, of course, she did not laugh, in those grim days 
when the shock of the treacherous assault shook her soul 
to its very foundations, and the whole world seemed to 
rock dizzily with the impact. Nobody but the hoche laughed 
in those days ; and that laughter was not good to hear, with 
its taint of brimstone and raw blood. Yet the saving re- 
action, the inevitable, essential rebound was not long in 
coming, and individually and collectively the French felt 
the tug of the desire to smile. Voila — they made something 
to smile at, and the whole world is the richer for that inex- 
tinguishable gaiety. 

They have that rare quality, the ability to see the funny 
side of even their greatest privations and sufferings. Their 

250 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 251 

weird trencE newspapers ridicule the man who complains 
of his pillow — a mud puddle — heing soiled because the 
man who stood on it last spit on it rather too freely, as 
well as poke fun at exalted generals. Not exactly parlor 
humor — that pillow joke! But soldiers are children, and 
anj^thing that makes them laugh because of its human uni- 
versality is chuckled over and repeated and Telished, and 
passed from lip to lip, until it becomes almost a classic. 
These trench papers, at first written out by hand, mimeo- 
graphed when war settled down into long trench sieges, 
and now often printed on regular presses, have a keen 
wit and a vivid style no publication of civil life can hope 
to obtain. 

From the beginning, the artists at home have kept pace 
with their fellows in the lines. One of the men whose 
drawings gather a crowd around the windows where they 
are exposed on the Grands Boulevards, went up to the 
front for a time and came back with a whole portfolio of 
ideas — slangy, gay, impertinent, but always witty. One of 
his sketches shows a private staggering back into the fire 
trench at supper-time with two big kettles of stew for his 
waiting comrades — and a beautiful black eye. Beneath it 
runs the fable, here Englished to correspond with the sol- 
dier slang: 

"Great Scott, old scout— hit?" 

"You said it ! Caught a flying beet in the lamp !" 

Everybody in France knows what exploding shells do in 
a field of sugar-beets, and they love Poulbot for seeing, not 



252 WITH THREE ARMIES 

the shell, not the escape from a mangling death, but that 
flying beet and the astonished black eye. 

Poulbot's humor sometimes takes forms America can not 
grasp easily, or altogether appreciate, so thoroughly Gallic 
is it, but his impertinence is quite as American as any- 
thing America ever produced in the days when our humor 
was crisp and sparkling and unspoiled. "Here, you, cut 
out that shooting," he makes a poilu up a tree, spotting 
for the guns, remark to a group of angry bodies below 
shooting at him, "or Fll come down and kick your pants 
off !" The first time I saw that cartoon in a Paris window 
an elderly gentleman with the ribbon of the civil branch 
of the Legion d'Honneur in his buttonhole stopped beside 
me and labored over it with myopic eyes for at least five 
minutes. His grave, careworn face lightened ; little, pleased 
wrinkles gathered about his eyes and mouth. He suddenly 
pounded the sidewalk with his stick. "Pensez-vous!" he 
exclaimed softly. "Imagine! The young scoundrel! I'll 
bet he captured every mother's son of 'em, too!" and the 
old gentleman marched off, a little straighter than before, 
slashing before him with his very unmilitary cane. 

Every phase of the war comes under the keen pens of the 
gifted men with the long hair and the greasy, spotted cor- 
duroy trousers and flowing neckties over in the Quarter. 
Here one asks trenchantly in a little dialogue between a 
mother and baby as the boche troops file past with civilian 
prisoners : "Mama, are these the men who shot my Papa ?" 
Humor? Yes — the kind of humor that makes France grit 



PROPACANDE ALLEMANDE 




— (Ob ne croiiail pas que j'ai iui la mere.) 



Dirty Belgium ! — Ach ! — there it is 
It doesn't know I just killed its mother raining again! 




It is not me — It is him 



Comrade ! — mama ! — comrade ! 




''Run ! Tell mama I'm a prisoner of war — with the milk" 




Lucky for me my sleeves are so long they don't know 
I've got my hands yet 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 253 

her teeth, swear by all the curious and inoffensive things 
that go into French profanity, and turn with a gay smile 
to the cheery, bearded Chasseur Alpin, bent double under 
his load of eighty pounds — "Heavy? Imagine! Got the 
kid's picture in there !" 

And how the Frenchman has reveled for three years in 
his gibes at the Teutonic stupidity and heaviness and in- 
decencies! The Kaiser, peering through a field telescope 
at the heaps of German dead piled against the outworks of 
Fort de Vaux at Verdun, was handled roughly. "Sire," 
his Adjutant reported in great agitation, "our dead are 
mounting steadily before Fort de Vaux !" And the Em- 
peror was made to reply, in his sadic folly: "All the bet- 
ter! They'll get us to the top after all!" Grim, indeed; 
grimmer, in fact, than even that other, censored, drawing 
of a milestone in the open, marked indistinctly "Verdun 
. . . Kilometres," with the whole landscape covered by 
German bodies, and below it the only words the censor 
permitted to appear — "The Goal." They got there. France 
admitted that ; admitted all the German War Office claimed 
of Germany's arrival at Verdun ; published it, even, to her 
own people — showed how successfully they got there ! 

Berlin and its millinery shops, where hats stamped with 
black iron crosses could be turned out "eighty thousand a 
day" to follow the latest mode ; the hungry mob outside the 
empty butcher-shop, with the butcher safe behind his grille 
telling the people, "No meat to-day, but get the Official 
Communique — it's excellent !" ; the helmeted soldiers kneel- 



254 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

ing behind a tombstone before which a widow and orphan 
pray (The Listening Post) ; and the weather in Belgium, 
which so annoyed the happy German soldiery with its con- 
tinually tearful skies, all came in for either fun or fury, 
but always with a power to touch the French heart in its 
tenderest spot, and always with the fewest pen strokes, the 
simplest words, the broadest sympathy. 

Even when their hearts were torn asunder by the stories 
from the front, by the evidence brought back and given 
them to see, of the frightful atrocities committed upon the 
helpless and the non-combatant, the French found some- 
thing to make a joke of. Gallant and joyous race! No 
strain of war, no unending agony can break or even warp 
them so long as that precious ability to jest with death and 
terror lasts. The huge German officer pistoling Edith 
Cavell when the firing squad had failed to complete its 
work is made ludicrous as he stands with one hand in his 
pocket and with a nonchalant smile upon his lips, white 
gloves on his hands, his boots polished to mirrors, a per- 
fect type of "The Great Germany," a figure as inhuman 
as the fat boche infantryman feeding a baby of the invaded 
region and grinning: "It doesn't know I just killed its 
mother !" 

"Run !" cries a ragged, grinning brat with a milk-pail, 
in one of Poulbot's satires, straining away from the boche 
who has seized him, while two smaller children watch 
in terror. "Run, kids ! Tell Mama I'm a prisoner of war 
— with the milk !" Even the children know enough to 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 255 

make a jest for Mother's sake of the captivity that means 
only God knows what. And the two tots shivering on the 
ridgepole Christmas Eve, hoping to see a Zeppelin even if 
they don't see Christmas, typify the French ability to make 
something out of nothing, or a reward out of a pang or a 
disaster. 

Certainly Poulbot knows the heart of childhood, as well 
as the heart of humanity, or he could never have sketched 
a little girl, her right arm in a sling, kneeling before a 
small mound surrounded by stones and headed by a black 
cross, while behind her two other children look on at the 
grim little game, and one says : "It's her hand." 

The grimmest, as well as the wittiest, of all tjie war 
sketches I have seen, is another child picture. Two mon- 
strous German soldiers, like misshapen grotesques under 
their kits and their bags of loot, goose-step past some burn- 
ing ruins. In the foreground a typical French gamin grins 
from ear to ear in malicious bliss as he looks down at the 
sleeves of the old overcoat which engulfs him completely. 
"Gee !" would be our way of putting his caustic com- 
mentary. "Lucky for me my sleeves are so long they don't 
know I've got my hands yet !" 

In the shop where I purchased most of my sketches, 
Madame came to me one evening with three drawings I 
had not seen. "You have been at the front, of course, 
Monsieur?" she said. I assented. "Eh Men! And you live 
here in Paris?" 

"Between times, Madame. I go to Lens to-morrow." 



256 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

"Perfectly ! Eegard these, then," and she handed over 
the cards. 

"On les aum!" I read beneath three children climbing 
on one another's shoulders to reach the jam-shelf. "We'll 
get them !" — Marshal Joffre's adjuration at the Marne and 
the Somme reduced to the terms of domesticity. The sec- 
ond was a colloquy between an ancient dame in front of 
her stationery shop and the barkeeper of the cafe next 
door. The aged complainer stands with a franc in her 
hand, ready to put it into the slot of her gas-meter. "First 
we have poor gas/ 5 she grumbles, "and then we have gas 
full of water, and pretty soon we'll have asphyxiating 
gas !" ^rightfulness in daily life behind the front, whether 
it be the lack of gas or of food or of heat, has so inured the 
people to personal hardship that they turn the edge of the 
meatless, heatless, wheatless, hot-waterless days with a quip 
whenever they spare a moment to think of them at all. 
Madame watched me closely as I smiled over the pictures, 
her own ruddy features glowing with satisfaction. When I 
turned to the last card, a charcoal of a little girl leading a 
plow-horse while mother guided the plow past a low cross 
surmounted by a soldier's Tcepi, she could restrain herself no 
longer. 

"U autre trancliee!" she cried, quoting the printed title. 
"The other trench! Chic, hien chic, n'est ce pas?" She 
dashed something out of her dark eyes and nodded at me 
with a new smile, a smile that showed the depths of her 
soul. "France wars," she said softly. "We war for her." 




It's her hand 




LA BORNE. 

The goal 




Are those the men who shot my papa ? 




22^55 

UN POSTE DtCOUTE 
A listening post 



i^^Tjgisasiw* 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW AST 257 

That was all. "We war for her/' we women, we children 
of light and gaiety, we who have not forgotten how to 
smile and be gay despite the lumps of leads within our 
breasts where our hearts once were. Only by the merest 
chance did I learn later that her own war-widowed daugh- 
ter was warring for France behind a plow, whose reforme 
(returned as useless by the Army) horse was guided by her 
little daughter. Coming back to the shop later on, I asked 
Madame if she had shown me everything she had. 

"Monsieur," she said gravely, "you are an American. 
But, also, you understand. You have been here with us. 
You have been at the front. You know what war means. 
You will not be hurt for your country if — ?" 

"Madame," I answered, "I am going home to try to 
make my country feel this war as she has never felt any- 
thing before. There are no nations any more among us 
Allies. I am not American — you are not French. We be- 
long to the same family." 

That fat old woman, who before the war might well have 
been considered not to have one idea in her shiny black- 
dyed head, bowed from the waist with a royal grace. "Mon- 
sieur should be French !" she said ; but it was more like an 
explosion of gratitude than a compliment. Then she 
handed me a great, stark charcoal, a thing of few strokes 
and sinister ones — a blazing farm, some huddled refugees, 
one lone woman silhouetted against a sky blank save for 
a vanishing hodie aviatih. Under it the artist, still full of 



258 WITH THREE AEMIES 

the fine fury of composition, had scrawled: "Dire qu'il y 
a encore des neutres! — They say there are still neutrals!" 

Brave Madame! She knew in her heart that America 
was not yet awake, and she risked that most dreadful thing 
— the loss of a customer — to try to stir at least one Amer- 
ican to new vision. 

The war that has bred a new spirit throughout civiliza- 
tion has been obliged to coin a new language all its own to 
suit the new conditions it has brought about. Drumfire 
and barrages, ~N"o Man's Land and "going over the top" are 
only examples of the innumerable now familiar terms 
which sounded so strange to our unaccustomed ears a brief 
three years ago. The soldier slang of to-day will be the 
common speech of to-morrow when the men come back 
home. But there are certain phases of the martial activity 
which have not as yet been able to reduce to speech of any 
sort what the men who cause them know and feel and do, 
so that the civilian can understand. Of all these, the air 
service stands first in unintelligibility. 

The air is the last of the elements to be conquered by 
human ingenuity, and that ingenuity has produced so many 
marvels not in themselves properly of the air, that one 
stands confused before the complexity of the service, which, 
without any solid basis to rest upon, can utilize such hith- 
erto unimagined accessories. For not only has flying been 
reduced in three years from a haphazard sport to a science 
with definitely established laws as a basis from which the 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 259 

individual must work out his own refinements, but it has 
ceased largely to be hazardous and become almost common- 
place in the regularity and precision of its achievements. 
Because of its demands, cameras were produced that would 
photograph with the speed of a lightning flash, often 
through mists and haze, objects which to an ordinary 
camera would not even appear as pinpoints without form 
or detail. And yet more because of its demands, a new 
breed of man has suddenly sprung into spiritual being, a 
creature so far removed from the man of the trenches, from 
the man in the street at home, that he is a type by him- 
self, indescribable and almost unknowable, save by his 
comrades of the same service. He can not be adequately 
translated into speech or analyzed by the psychologist any 
more than the things he does in the aether five miles above 
the earth can be described in any terms men now under- 
stand. I had despaired of being able to tell anything of 
this. Then I learned he can be set before us so vividly, so 
powerfully, that the most utterly earth-bound intelligence 
can grasp something of his loftiness of soul and serenity 
of life. 

One day in the Foreign Office Press Bureau, I was beg- 
ging for a chance to go at once to Reims. My friend Mon- 
sieur Zhee murmured something about too many shells just 
then, took out a card, scribbled on it, and handed it to 
me. — He was always handing me a sop ! 

"Go up to the Aero Club de France," he suggested sooth- 
ingly, "and see some remarkable aeroplane pictures." 



260 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

I walked out of the Foreign Office dejected. Eeims 
seemed a very faint, if lurid, vision far down on the hori- 
zon. I was being balked, and it was annoying. I was weary 
of aeroplanes. I had seen them by the hundred on the dif- 
ferent fighting fronts. I had seen them fight and run, fight 
and fall. I could recognize their elemental differences of 
build and style from the ground while they were buzzing 
angrily above me in the air. And now I was invited to go 
and look at a lot of mechanical daubs of paint on canvas, 
telling me less than I already knew! But I went to the 
Aero Club anyway, picking up an American friend who 
languidly consented to be bored with me, since he also knew 
aeroplanes. 

From the reception room I glimpsed highly colored, im- 
pressionistic-looking canvases on the walls of the exhibition- 
room adjoining, and groaned as I turned toward my com- 
panion. He was standing like a man petrified, staring at 
a picture on the table. 

"The Crusades!" he murmured, almost whispering the 
words. "Look at that twentieth-century Eichard the 
Lionheart V 9 

It was a bust. Over the head was tightly fastened the 
aviator's leather helmet, closing in with its wind-proof 
embrace stern, fine, fearless features illuminated by pierc- 
ing, all-inclusive eyes, and given repose and dignity by a 
strong, generous nose and firm lips. It was a predatory 
face, the visage of a fighter, a study of a warrior soul that 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 261 

loves the combat for its own sake. And yet, without in any 
way destroying the grimness and virility of that perfect 
boyish knighthood of another age revivified, was a tender 
sweetness that humanized it — those close-set lips could kiss 
those of a laughing girl, those eagle eyes cease from comb- 
ing the skies for doches and twinkle into the limpid orbs of 
wife or child. 

"A new type in art !" I whispered back, as thrilled as he. 
"The air crusader !" 

A big, rotund, ruby-faced Frenchman of some fifty-odd, 
full bearded and keen eyed, garbed in an aviator's uniform 
and puttees of the horizon blue, noting our absorption, 
came up. It was Monsieur Farre, who had painted the pic- 
ture. Crisp, as only a Frenchman can be eloquently crisp, 
he said: "Gentlemen — dead; upon the field of honor!" 
After a moment's pause, he added: "Lieutenant Dorme." 

I never knew Lieutenant Dorme, never heard of him, 
save as one of the French "Aces." Who he was and what 
he had done did not matter, in an artistic sense. What did 
matter was that he had been the inspiration to Monsieur 
Farre which resulted so splendidly in the creation of this 
air crusader. It conjured up a vision of that thirteenth- 
century past, so vivid the mind was instantly stimulated 
to some realization of the spirituality and rigorous knight- 
liness of these boys of France — of all the Allied Nations — ■ 
who consecrate their lives to the uncertain element with all 
the gallantry and determination, "faithful unto death," 
that characterized the knights of the Middle Ages who 



262 WITH THREE ARMIES 

tilted against the paynim or died on the scaling ladders in 
the moats of Acre and Jerusalem. 

When I looked into the eyes of Monsieur Earre I could 
understand the portrait even better. They were mystic eyes, 
curiously in contrast to the heavy, rubicund features, so full 
of well-fed good nature and not untouched by a trace of the 
painter's consciousness of his power and resource. They 
were dreamer's eyes, in whose pale grayish-blue depths 
lurked a knowledge of the air gained by experience. The 
eyes of seafaring men sometimes have this eerie conscious- 
ness. But they are different : they deal with the tangible al- 
ways, with clouds whose flight is measured by sea or shore, 
with the sea whose waves give contrast and motion and 
shifting colors one can grasp, with winds whose whisper or 
bluster ruffles or tears very material waters. Here were eyes 
that somehow spoke of seeing motion of aether; of probing 
the skyey heights and profundities where no motionless 
thing exists to give motion the illusion we of the earth need, 
to realize what motion is; of knowing what it means to fall 
a mile at cannon-ball speed, yet with clear head and nerve 
unshaken. What wonder such eyes could imagine, and 
guide the brush to realize on a bit of canvas, a crusader 
returned to life for a brief space that he might serve man- 
kind by reestablishing the ancient ideal of knighthood in 
its perfect flower! 

Henry Earre was a painter of marines before the world 
holocaust transformed him into Bombardier-Observer 
Earre. And now it is the skies, the air that guide his 



:.'■ ;w 



>M-i 



WBsBBBBmtK ' 










rrom a painting by Henry Farre 

Lieutenant Dorme. "Dead on the field of honor" 



A SAVING HUMOR AND A NEW ART 263 

brain and brush in dreams wrought in colors now vague 
and now lurid, in forms now almost lost in the supporting 
asther, now sharply defined and coldly wrought : a machine 
bombarding a hydroaeroplane in distress; that other ma- 
chine raising a perfect cloudburst of water as it darts furi- 
ously down upon a sneaking submarine; the ghostly, 
ghastly, half -discerned shapes of a flock of machines wing- 
ing their nervous way through and beyond the deadly bar- 
rage fire that fills the opaque sky all about them with 
horrid little spotty bursts of smoke; that marvelous night 
reconnaissance beside an astonished moon; and the weird 
scene above Verdun in a sky full of stars and star-shells, 
searchlights and shrapnel. 

The painter's simple mind groped for words to describe 
and identify for us what his brushes had plucked from the 
swirling skies. He struggled to find, to coin that new lan- 
guage which should make intelligible the unspoken 
thoughts behind the canvases — and failed. Faintly he 
splashed-in a sort of verbal tone-picture of the effects the 
upper air has upon the human mind; of the sense that 
comes to one who looks down upon the muddy ball five 
miles below — an all but indistinguishable neutral blob or 
a brilliant series of flattened-out color contrasts — of utter 
detachment, of freedom, of — . It is no use. Bombardier- 
Observer Farre could not give it me, and I can not transmit 
what I lack. 

At some not far distant day, when the war is a thing of 
the past, and we are traveling safely and swiftly through 



264' WITH THREE ARMIES 

the unstable medium as easily as birds because of the in- 
trepidity and hard thinking under the sternest pressure of 
these bird-men of the war, the speech may be found, the 
terms discovered or invented to tell the story now so vague 
that even those who sense it do not know exactly what it 
is — "a psychological condition" beyond doubt, but needing 
a new psychology for its medium of expression. 

Meantime, whether or not the critics agree that these 
gloomy and glowing, sharply defined and hazily impression- 
istic paintings are worthy to be ranked as masterpieces, the 
fact remains that they mark a new phase — bold exponents 
of the inventive idealism of the twentieth century. And to 
whomsoever has seen them, no matter what other impres- 
sion has faded, there will come back again and again — fresh 
and strong and full of the new spirit the air of the upper 
skies has bred in men — the feeling that they speak with the 
conviction of experience the new something we are all to 
learn some day — and soon. 



CHAPTER XVII 



LEFT-OVERS 



As the end of the book comes in sight, notes until now 
overlooked keep turning up in unexpected ways, and ideas 
and memories forgotten in the press of traveling, lecturing 
and writing keep recurring with most insistent demands 
for inclusion — so insistent there is nothing for it but to 
gather them all into one genial spread of left-overs. 

Until I applied in Paris for my police papers, I thought 
I knew who I was. After four days of going up and down 
and to and fro through Paris and her police stations, I 
confessed I wasn't even certain I had ever been born ! At 
the Foreign Office a courteoiis official gave me a note to 
that majestic functionary, Monsieur le Prefet de Police, 
asking him to be so kind as to expedite the securing of my 
papers. Eight there my troubles began. I presented my 
note at Headquarters. A glorious person in a dress suit — ■ 
ten o'clock in the morning, when Headquarters opened ! 
— with a massive, silvered dog-chain around his neck, re- 
joicing in the ominous sounding title of Huissier notwith- 
standing his innocent occupation as office-boy, bade me be 
seated and wait upon the pleasure of the august one con- 
cealed within. 

265 



266 WITH THREE AEMIES 

Half an hour passed. Came the liuissier again. "Mon- 
sieur, you must go to your own Arrondissement police sta- 
tion, and apply for your papers there. Monsieur le Prefet 
has been pleased to receive the note. He has filed it." 

To the other end of the city I sped in a decrepit taxi. 
The desk sergeant was very polite. "I am sorry, Monsieur, 
but we do not issue permits here. You should visit," etc. 
I spent four dollars that day in taxi fares ! By evening I 
had discovered that the police stations, like all decently 
regulated Government offices, closed at four, and that be- 
fore I could secure permission even to make application for 
a stranger's "Card of Identity" and "Certificate of Matricu- 
lation" (permission to reside in Paris), I must have a 
statement from my hotel that I was actually in residence. 
When I demanded somewhat sharply of the clerk, who 
immediately made it out for me, why he had not told me of 
that requirement before I began my quest, he merely 
blinked and shrugged. 

The days passed, the taxi fares mounted. I took to 
walking and objurgation. At last I stumbled into the proper 
groove and the end was in sight. In the same huge build- 
ing that contained Headquarters, I took my place on the 
benches with a row of other miserMes, and grinned at the 
conversation of my nearest neighbors, two American ladies 
come over to do relief work, both of them former residents 
of Paris, and both armed with their expired permits of 
other days. Before the grin was half-way across my face, a 
lynx-eyed person in plain clothes tapped my shoulder. 



LEFT-OVEKS 267 

"Pardon, Monsieur/' he remarked severely. "One does 
not smile here." 

I gave him one glance. "Pardon, Monsieur," I replied 
gravely, "one indeed does not smile in here !" 

Fortunately, both the American ladies had handker- 
chiefs handy. The French and Belgians did not under- 
stand, and looked blank. But we three dared not so much 
as glance at one another after that. 

There was more waiting, more red tape to be unknotted 
before I could get to the far-away front, relieved, however, 
by one little journey that will always remain an impressive 
memory — the celebration of the third anniversary of the 
Battle of the Marne. We were all there: correspondents, 
visitors, dignitaries, the President and most of his Cabinet, 
the victor himself and his commanders — Poincare, Eibot, 
Steeg; "Papa" Joffre, Foch, Petain, Gouraud the "Lion 
d'Afrique," and all the rest. The train was in two quite 
distinct parts, though physically one : ahead, the President 
of France, the Cabinet officers, Field Marshal Joffre and 
the great Generals; behind, the Foreign Office and Press 
Bureau officials, correspondents and visitors. Each division 
had its own diner, and, at the station, its own military 
buses, like the irreverent "rubberneck wagons" of America. 

They took us of the last division in a torrential down- 
pour to the edge of the battle-field and calmly dumped us 
out into the chilling rain — and we stayed there, soaked and 
cold, until, half an hour later, the sun broke through the 
clouds and the dignitaries arrived. Long before, the civil- 



268 WITH THREE ARMIES 

ian population of the vicinity for miles around had gath- 
ered, careless of exposure: mothers with babies in their 
arms, drenched to the skin, little girls whose thin legs 
were plastered by their thinner, dripping calico, boys whose 
trousers clung black and whose shirts ridged in 'soaking 
wrinkles along their muscular young backs, old men whose 
beards glistened with drops. Soldiers there were by the 
thousand — veterans of the great fight. They stood in ser- 
ried ranks that made a broad avenue of entrance to the 
grass dai's, behind which a neat artificial green screen had 
been raised to keep off the wind. All about, the broad ex- 
panse of sweet, fresh green, that rolled and swelled and 
fell away to rise again in long, ridgelike knolls rippling 
into the hazy distance, was poignant with occasional 
graves. Buried where they fell ! "What Frenchman can ever 
forget that bitter field, where the kindly, smiling old gen- 
tleman with the seven stars of a Field Marshal on his 
sleeves gave the order to die rather than yield a single foot ? 
There he was now, coming smiling along that wide ave- 
nue, alone, before him the President and Cabinet, behind 
him his Generals. Immortal JofTre! He dared to retreat. 
He dared to keep his lips tight shut and retreat, and re- 
treat, and retreat — while France and all the rest of the 
world wondered — until that day when he called his com- 
manders together on the steps of the Headquarters Chateau 
and said simply to them that along this line they must 
halt the foe. He did not seem at all the masterful soldier, 



LEFT-OVEBS 269 

not at all the dashing cavalier — just a well-fed, happy, 
simple country gentleman. But he was— Joffre ! 

The bands blared as the little procession advanced, bare- 
headed over that hallowed ground through the dripping 
grass. The high dignitaries took their places. Prime Min- 
ister Kibot, gigantically tall, painfully emaciated, pale 
faced and snowy haired, mounted the dais and every hat 
in the vast assemblage came off as he read, with shaking 
voice and tremulous hands, the brief speech we had been 
permitted to study coming out in the train — words without 
emotion, without emphasis, almost, without a trace of the 
fireworks a French speech so often contains; but words 
that spoke the inflexible determination of France to go on 
to the end, to extermination if need be, for the sake of 
civilization and honor. 

Once more the buses picked us up, ground their way 
over the slippery, muddy roads to the little Chateau de 
Mondemont, torn to pieces by the shelling, first of the 
French guns that drove out the bodies, then of the boclie 
guns that could not dislodge the victors. Under a great 
tree near by General Foch stood with map in hand, ex- 
plaining how he had been able to smash Von Kluck's ad- 
vance, which covered the plain and the famous marshes 
that swept away at his feet. The story had everything 
Premier Eibot's speech had not. It was dramatic and full 
of vivid color. Here the Death's Head Hussars went down 
in the marshes — here the whole line crumpled and broke. 



270 WITH THREE ARMIES 

As General Foch's eyes cooled and he slowly folded up his 
map — the one he used in that very Chateau as his head- 
quarters during the battle — President Poincare said to him 
softly: "But, my General, you have forgotten one thing." 

The General turned upon him with a start of astonish- 
ment. 

"Mon President!" he exclaimed. "Forgotten some- 
thing . . . ?" 

President Poincare smiled, and laid a hand on the hori- 
zon blue shoulder. 

"Oui, mon General — yourself I" 

Marshal, Generals, President and Cabinet went down 
into the field below, where more thousands, this time heavy 
cavalry, very different in their war-time horizon blue from 
their former black and scarlet with shining breastplates 
and helmets, stood stiffly in review. The trumpeters blazed 
out a terrific fanfare that volleyed through the quiet valley 
shrill and stirring, and the band burst into the Sanibre et 
la Meuse, that old march which would make the mummy of 
Rameses II beat on its case and struggle to get out and 
fight! The shivering countryfolk heard it with awe, 
watched the cavalry re-form and trot away as the last of 
the officials vanished in the automobiles, stood there petri- 
fied with their memories. And my last memory of that cele- 
bration is the picture of some cavalrymen posted as sentries 
during the affair, galloping their horses furiously over 
hedges and across muddy fields to get back to their com- 
mands. 



LEET-OVERS 271 

Afterward, as I stood one morning outside the entrance 
to the great Charing Cross railroad station in London, the 
picture flashed before me again while I watched ambu- 
lances and private motors file slowly out with wounded just 
arriving in Blighty. Why a hundred or so wounded Brit- 
ish Tommies should evoke that vision of galloping Erench 
cavalry, I can not imagine, but they did. Perhaps it was 
the very extremity of the contrast — these emaciated, pale, 
helpless ; those full of the color and vigor of life. Relatives 
and friends waited beside me on the sidewalk, their arms 
overflowing with flowers and heather, their eyes with glad- 
some tears. And how the men reached for those extended 
branches ! They were clutching at England — at home — at 
life itself! They waved back with pallid smiles of utter 
content, hugging their guerdons close as the motors rolled 
out and were swallowed by the unhesitating traffic. The 
sidewalks, too, pulsed steadily on, save for the few who 
had reason to be there, and myself. Why? Was England 
so absorbed in the sordid struggle for existence she had no 
time for her shattered children ? Rather was it not that the 
street saw, closed its eyes and passed on deliberately, un- 
willing to drain itself of spirit and nerve which could do no 
good to the returning, and which it might very well need it- 
self at any moment? 

Once in England, the comparative absence of red tape is 
refreshing. My hotel handed me the usual war-time blank 
form, notifying me to register as an alien within so many 
hours at such and such a police station. My passport duly 



272 "WITH THREE AEMIES 

examined, docketed and stamped, I was asked when I was 
leaving and where I was going. The replies being satis- 
factory, the deskman smiled pleasantly and said: 

"I know Americans very well, sir, so I'll just put you 
down as leaving Wednesday. Save you the bother orf com- 
ing around again. If you don't go, sir, would you mind 
dropping in again so we can fix up the record ?" 

"I'll go, if my steamer does !" I responded. 

"Yessir. Thank you, sir. Now, is there anything I can 
do for you while you're 'ere in Lunnon, sir ? We're Allies, 
sir, you know." 

I went thoughtfully out of that dim, spotless police sta- 
tion, wondering a little sadly how the minions of the law in 
a New York police station would treat an Englishman un- 
der similar circumstances, and Whether an unknown desk 
sergeant would volunteer help to make New York a little 
brighter for the visitor. I wondered, too, if everything I 
had done and said since I left the city of the ragged sky- 
line could stand beside the perfectly unconscious gentility 
of that policeman. . . . 

Where does all the copper and small silver go in France ? 
No one who knows has told, and no one else can tell. But 
the shortage is so great, the need for small currency so 
urgent, that practically every large community has issued 
its own notes for small change, exactly as the United States 
was once compelled to issue "shin-plasters." Imagine sol- 
emn-looking bills for five and ten cents ! I was told that in 



LEET-OVEKS 273 

some rural districts notes for as little as two cents apiece 
had also appeared. The bothersome feature of these minia- 
ture bills to the stranger is that they are of value only in 
the city or community that issues them. Elsewhere they 
are mere "scraps of paper." 

In September somebody with an eye to saving time and 
small change, issued the order that the railway ticket 
agents need not make change except at will. Instead of 
saving anything, this merely gave peevish agents the chance 
to vent their spleen on the public. The clamor was instant, 
noisy and continuous. I heard one such squabble, which 
left both agent and traveler wrathful. She was old and fat 
and covered with bundles. A long queue of impatient sol- 
diers, citizens and officers waited behind her for a chance 
at a ticket in the three minutes remaining before the 
wickets closed. Madame dropped her big bundles in open- 
ing her pocketbook. "While the police examined her permit 
to travel, she counted out her paper and silver and shoved it 
at the agent. He pushed it back through the grille to her 
with a snarl. 

"Too much ! Seven eighty-five, I said. Make change or 
get out !" 

"Keep the change !" retorted Madame with spirit, will- 
ing — amazingly enough for a thrifty Frenchwoman — to 
waste three cents for the sake of catching her train. 

The agent boiled over. Thrusting his black whiskers 
through the bars he shook them at her, shouting: "Get 
out! Get out! Get out! Next!" 



274 WITH THREE ARMIES 

Madame refused to budge. She and the agent struggled 
for the ticket, each holding fast to an end while the crowd 
fumed behind her. 

"Give me my ticket !" she cried. "You make me to lose 
my train, camel !" 

"Camel yourself !" roared the agent. "Miss it or make 
change !" 

"I can't ! You can keep the change !" 

"Idiot! Camel! How can I keep your change when I 
can't ! I don't have to !" 

In his rage, his fingers loosed a little, and Madame 
snatched her ticket through the bars in shrill triumph, fell 
over her bundles, grabbed them up, and waddled away amid 
a chorus of laughter from the crowd, half of whom missed 
the train because of the rumpus. 

There is plenty of humor in Paris to salt the days of war. 
The jours maigres — meager days — have been the source of 
endless quips and not a few sous to the delightful comic 
periodicals, most of which have managed to weather the 
storm of reduced circulation and advertisements, and the 
high prices of necessaries. First contact with these -less 
days is rather a knockout to pampered Americans. My 
hotel gravely accommodated me with the usual room and 
bath. But the hot water would not run. I rang for the 
waiter. One does ring for strange things and persons over 
there. 

"What's the matter with that hot water ?" I demanded. 



LEFT-OVERS 275 

"Hot water, Monsieur ? You wish to shave ?" 

I needed to shave, but I pointed to the tub full of cold 
water, indicating that I had not drawn all that for shaving. 

ff AJi / Pardon! Pardon, Monsieur! But there 

is no hot water ! One bathes now only twice a week." 

"Twice a week !" 

"Oui, Monsieur, the Saturday and the Sunday !" 

When I asked the clerk why he had given and charged 
me for useless accommodations, he displayed an almost 
human intelligence. 

"Perfectly, Monsieur," he agreed. "It is of a uselessness 
most of the times, but is it not that it is of a use that it is 
there, and ready when the hot water comes-to-arrive and 
Monsieur wishes, his bath without having to wait before the 
ordinary chamber of the baths ?" 

One of the papers suggested that since France had days 
without heat, without sweets, without meat, without hot 
water, without this and without that, the country go one 
step farther in its heroism and demand one day each week 
without — speeches in the Chamber ! But nobody, up to the 
time I left, had dared suggest a day without the "movies" ! 

The lack of sugar has had one amusing consequence. All 
along the rue de la Paix, where the highest-priced jewelers 
in the world have their tempting displays, little "sugar- 
safes" or fobs in solid gold, in platinum, in combinations 
of both metals — but never in the vulgar silver ! — are on 
exhibition. Tiny things they are, just big enough to hold 
one or two dominoes of sugar, but costly enough to make 



276 WITH THREE ARMIES 

them as ridiculous as they are eagerly acquired. The rich 
and thoughtless fill them daily as they start forth on their 
promenades, so that if the afternoon tea be not sweet 
enough, the "safe" can be opened and that shocking lack 
supplied. 

One of the most interesting things I saw, and neglected 
to set down in its proper place, is the big horse-and-mule 
hospital behind the British front. So much has been 
heard of the cruel treatment of animals in warfare — much 
of it entirely true, but also misleading — that this enormous 
life-saving station was a revelation to me, with its long, 
low, whitewashed, open-sided stables, its broad meadows 
of sweet grass where there is ample room to roll and kick 
up and gallop about. Here are doctors and nurses, operat- 
ing-rooms and convalescent wards, isolation pens and ex- 
perimental rooms, exactly as in the hospitals where Tommy 
himself is cared for. The patient, intelligent brutes — there 
were twenty-five hundred of them there when I saw the 
establishment — seem to realize that even when they are 
being hurt, it is for their good. At least eighty per cent, 
of the cases had recovered up to that time. They in- 
cluded injuries and ailments of every sort to which horse- 
flesh is heir: wounds, scratches infected by the mud of 
northern France and Flanders — where the fertilizers of 
ten centuries have bred poisons no constitution can with- 
stand — bites, kicks, broken legs, everything. Pasted on 
the pillar of eacli animal's stall is a card giving its num- 



LEFT-OVEKS ' 277 

ber, the details of its case and progress and the other 
usual data — temperature, diet, etc. Here the terrors of 
battle are forgotten, lean barrels fill out quickly, fire re- 
turns to jaded eyes, and dulled coats take on a new 
luster under the assiduous carryings of men who love 
and know how to handle animals. One Cockney 'ostler 
was polishing off a particular pet though it was time for 
him to be at his tea, instead of chatting with the playful 
horse, who arched his neck and stretched his bad leg, and 
whickered appreciatively. If he had been a cat, he would 
have purred. 

"Where was he hurt ?" I asked the stableman, as he stood 
back. 

"Wipers, sir," the Cockney answered, and fell to comb- 
ing again. 

Wipers! The Belgians call it Ypres (Eepr), which de- 
rives from the French term for the elm trees, ypern, that 
used to grow there in numbers. But British Thomas is no 
etymologist, no purist in pronunciation. "Wipers? In 
course, sir. They spells it wiv a Y, don't they?" And so 
the city will remain Wipers to the end of time, whatever 

the dilettanti may call it ! 

American Sammy has not been "over there" long enough 
as yet to develop any such mass of loving myth as British 
Tommy has gathered about himself ; but already the racial 
characteristics have appeared, and Paris knows the likes 
and dislikes of the new Ally. One afternoon between trips 



278 WITH THREE AEMIES 

to the front, I left the Eoreign Office, which had been 
even more courteous — and unresponsive ! — than usual, and 
despairingly accepted the invitation of a billboard an- 
nouncing a picture play given distinction by some of the 
foremost actors in France. It was exquisitely done. My 
neighbor in the dark proved to be a Sammy, a rough dia- 
mond from one of our largest cities, full of energy and 
ideas. As the lights came on he nodded recognition of my 
American clothes, so easily distinguished in a French 
crowd. 

"Bum show, hey ?" he ventured. 

I tried to explain to him the difference between good act- 
ing and the painful antics of many of our American con- 
tortionists of the "movies." He listened, respectful but 
wholly unconvinced. 

"Well, maybe you're right, but I don't wise up to it a- 
tall. Maybe this is art. I dunno. I do know one thing. 
I know what I like. This ain't it ! Get me ? I like 'em t' 
eat 'em alive ! If this is the best Paris can do, I'm goin' t' 
cable me old frien' Dan Frohman to send us over a few 
hot ones." 

Later on, I passed my erstwhile seatmate emerging from 
another moving-picture "palace" luridly placarded with 
the notices of a wild western comedy. With him were half 
a dozen other husky artillerists. As he caught sight of me, 
he shouted joyously : 

" 'Lo, sport ! I found one ! "Reel one — seven-reel live 
wire. Somepn doin' every foot. Hey, boys?" 



LEFT-OVERS 279 

"Betcher life !" they echoed. 

"You better not go see it/' was his Parthian shot as they 
whistled off down the Boulevard. "Might jar yuh !" 

Coming back to Paris from one of my trips to the front, 
I was fortunate enough to board a train of permissionaires, 
or soldiers released from the mud and monotony for a ten- 
day frolic. First, second and third class carriages proved 
all alike to them. When we started, a big Canadian of the 
railway engineer corps, two French medical officers and 
myself were the only occupants of our compartment. Pres- 
ently in bounced four husky French heavy artillerymen 
with their monstrous packs and their more monstrous sa- 
bers. All were highly elated at going home. The two offi- 
cers left at the next station after a reprimand, but the 
poilus, recovering quickly, began a mild jamboree, singing 
their drinking songs, "firing" their howitzers with snap- 
ping fingers and loud "Bourns' 3 and winding up with a 
deafening "barrage" or "drumfire" of clapping hands and 
stamping feet while they shouted their chorus. 

Then one hauled his saber out of its scabbard and began 
fencing furiously with an imaginary boche, considerably to 
the discomfort of the big Canadian and myself. "Bit 
thick, this," he murmured to me, as the flashing blade 
whirled dangerously close to our heads with a wild lurch 
of the train. "Can you talk to 'em, sir ?" 

I ventured a gentle suggestion to the excited young ar- 



280 WITH THEEE AEMIES 

tillerist. For a moment he glared at me; then his emo- 
tion reversed at full speed. 

"Americam!" he cried, thumping the heavy sword back 
into its scabbard with a clang and a flourish. "Monsieur, I 
salute you. Vive VAmerique!" 

In two minutes we were excellent friends. As the train 
slowed for a station, the boy struggled into his pack, gruffly 
ordered his comrades to take up theirs, flung the door open 
and tumbled them all out — to pile into some other com- 
partment — with a cheery good-by and a word about not 
annoying an American gentleman with their filthy trench 
clothes and rough manners! The Canadian looked at 
me inquiringly. 

"Well, I'm damned!" he exclaimed as the explanation 
finally penetrated. "A Frenchie ! Why," he shouted, slap- 
ping a two-ton hand on my knee, "the blighter might've 
been an English gentleman hisself !" 

At every station more people, soldiers and civilians alike, 
crowded in. Many of the citizens had gone part way out 
to meet the permissionaires they expected. Into my com- 
partment came a hungry, pasty-faced young couple who 
had failed to meet their friends. They were decorated with 
tawdry finery and cheap jewelry, and smelled of the most 
vicious perfumery that ever tried to dissipate tfie odor of 
stale tobacco from a stale car cushion. But how human 
they were, "all dolled up" in their pitiful best for the occa- 
sion, and grieved as good children at their disappointment ! 
The husband tore apart a dirty paper package containing 




Celebration on the third anniversary of the Battle of the Marne. 
Top — Shows Field Marshal Joffre in black uniform. Bottom — A 
decorated grave, with veterans of the great battle standing at salute 

Photographs by the author 




The famous trench theater at Verdun, where the horrors of war 
were forgotten in remarkable entertainments 




In the woods of Verlot, occupied by the Germans and 
destroyed by Allied artillery 




Wanton destruction. Folembray Chateau — Aisne 



LEFT-OVEES 281 

a bottle of wine, tinned corned beef with a Chicago name 
blazoned on it, a hunk of pasty gray war bread, and some 
ancient cheese. His wife opened the tin, and cut her finger. 
He sucked the injured member tenderly one moment, and 
licked the grease from the top of the can next. Then he 
piled it with pieces of the meat he extracted with soiled 
fingers, and generously offered me a meal ! 

When we finally stopped in the smoky, echoing train- 
shed of the vast Gare du Nord, the platform became a swirl 
through which one could hardly move. All Paris seemed 
under the flaring arc-lights to greet the returning brave. 
Frantic women pulling crying children got in the way of 
tired-out baggagemen and hurrying soldiers. Bags shot 
from opened train doors and knocked people over, or fell 
underfoot and tripped the unwary. Yet everybody was 
good-natured. Laughter and tears mingled freely as the 
throng slowly surged its impeded way through the narrow 
wickets. 

Outside the station the crowd was even denser. The ex- 
pectants were packed solidly in a black mass so jammed 
that none of them could move. As we emerged the crowd 
sent up a strange, almost animal cry, half roar, half bit- 
ter sigh — ■ 

"They're coming!" 

Magically a lane opened. Every neck was craned to its 
utmost. Somewhere in the throng a woman's overwrought 
nerves betrayed her, and she began to cry shrilly. Other 
women caught the contagion. It might have been a great 



282 WITH THREE ARMIES 

funeral, instead of a joyous homecoming. But how eagerly 
the men were awaited ! Many of them had not seen home 
or families for ten months or a year, and even now the 
waiting thousands did not know what to expect. Would lie 
be there — umvounded — his old self . . . 9 

A woman clutched frantically at my sleeve — I was in my 
trench clothes — spun me completely around and peered 
into my face. 

"Non! Non! Not my man!" she cried, and stretched 
again to see over my shoulders. 

I forced my way through as gently as possible and es- 
caped into the street, glad to be clear of that atmosphere 
of tension. But I carried away with me something of it 
that still endures, something that points even yet to the 
hearts, not of France alone, but of all the militant Allied 
world : the certainty that what the peoples have endured — 
the waiting, the anxiety, the privation, the heart-hunger 
— has obliterated from their minds and souls everything 
but the raw essentials. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT — 

To-day, when the whole world trembles on the verge of 
dissolution and chaos, every man with a fountain pen or a 
typewriter seems to be quoting Hamlet to himself — 

"The time is out of joint : cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right !" 

Theories and panaceas are advanced in every periodical 
and review, so why should I not join the chorus? The 
theories advanced here may never amount to anything as 
practical suggestions, may never have the slightest consid- 
eration by the controllers of the world's destiny; but if 
they serve to make the innocent bystander wake up to his 
responsibility for the ultimate result, they will not have 
gone wholly wide of the mark. 

I have reached the end of what I have seen, of what I 
have heard along the battle fronts in France and Belgium, 
of some of the things worth telling that came under my 
observation in the cities far behind and close up to the 
lines. But this has all been merely the recitation — the in- 
terpretation, perhaps — of the visible and audible. I have 
not been able to work into any of the preceding chapters 

283 



284 WITH THREE ARMIES 

more than a hint here and there of the real things, of the 
vital issues this war of the worlds has conjured np out of 
chaos into the minds of men and women, "both at the 
front and far from it. One can not picture a surgeon weep- 
ing over a car full of mangled soldiers, and be much of a 
psychologist at the same time without spoiling the canvas. 
Now, however, with the vivid and the highly-colored behind 
me, I can, I must, go deeper than the superficial. For the 
men in the trenches, the women in the cities, the very chil- 
dren in the street, are thinking. 

What are they thinking about ? Why, the war, of course ; 
but not only of the war one sees and hears endlessly. They 
are thinking back to its causes, forward to the inevitable re- 
construction it means throughout the world. Never before 
in the history of mankind was there such an era of sober 
individual thought about individual responsibilities as well 
as individual rights and privileges. Not even the brightest 
days of the Florentine Renaissance saw men anything like 
so keenly awake to the realities of life, for then the change 
was one of a slow, gradual dawning of self-conscious spir- 
itual assertion made possible by study and mutual further- 
ance of progress. 

To-day, greed and hatred have brought the whole world 
up with a terrific shock, made it realize clearly that we 
stand at the precipice of the old regime. So the men who 
have fought and those who have fed and supplied them, the 
mothers who have sent their sons, and the wives and sisters 
who have suffered in silence, stand shivering on the edge, 



THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT— 285 

fully conscious of the black ruin below, and groping for 
a solution of their difficulties. The old things are to go — 
we know that ! — and with them our old habits of mind and 
thought. War is blowing the cobwebs out of our brains and 
leaving them with cleaner corners, less obstructed vision. 
We can never be the same again, any of us. But whether 
we be intelligent enough to reason matters out for our- 
selves, or intellectual hermit-crabs hiding in some bigger 
creature's shell of philosophy, we can see on every side the 
plain signs of the change, of the revision of our time- 
honored estimates of both life and men. 

The interdependence of peoples has been emphasized and 
made clear as never before; the soul of each country has 
been revealed to itself as well as to the rest of the family 
of nations; in consequence, each man and woman desires 
a peace which will rid him and her of the burden of war, 
and of preparation against whatever military monster. 
So, first of all, the peace treaty will have to be an unequivo- 
cal guarantee of permanent common decency. The greatest 
danger to that permanence will be our traditional generos- 
ity to a vanquished foe. In the elation of victory, we may 
be prone to overlook the suffering, the cost, the disturbance 
of everything worth while, and recall only the unfortunate 
chivalric utterance — so typical of that generous attitude — • 
that we are fighting the German Government, not the Ger- 
man people. 

Look across the Flanders fields among the poppies, and 
see the compact little beds of crosses, white among the scar- 



286 WITH THREE ARMIES 

let flowers. Look over at the trenches and see the human 
beings still fighting there with poison gas, with flame- 
throwers, with maces and knives and bombs. Consider the 
wounded in the hospitals, the sick and the hungry in the 
cities behind the lines, the shredded child victims of the 
air-raiders, the factories kept from their proper construc- 
tive work by the destructive demands of war work, and 
operated by women. Ponder all these; meditate upon a 
future filled with this same sort of thing, but worse ; dream 
visions of a greater war, so infinitely more terrible than 
this that we should see England, France, Italy, America, 
to say nothing of the little peoples, go flaming down to ruin 
without the slightest possibility of coming back for ages — 
and no one left on earth but the Hun and his impotent 
slaves. Is it not more than worth while, then, to see that 
the only thing which brought about this war, and which 
could ever bring about such another condition, be so hob- 
bled and restricted that it will eventually die of malnutri- 
tion? 

In considering peace we must face the fact squarely that 
the Teutonic Powers have won the war up to the present 
writing because of their profound study of exactly what 
they wanted, and their corresponding determination of the 
ways and means by which what they wanted could be ob- 
tained. Their strategy has been a sort of sublimated pol- 
itics, a highly-refined political and national economy of 
the most meticulous detail, applied to martial conquest and 
progress. That it will fail in the long run is due not to 



THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT— 287 

any fundamental defect in its logic, but to the defect in its 
premises, which argue that one member of a family can 
ignore the rights of all the rest. But in considering the 
problems of the afterward, however disastrously the Ger- 
man policy fail, we can not ignore the psychology which 
made that plan possible, nor overlook the fact that Germany 
is turning the same acute intelligence upon her after-war 
problems that she devoted to her preparations for war. 

A proof of her awareness and subtlety was going the 
rounds of the Boulevards in Paris just before I left, a tale 
utterly beyond human imagination a few years ago. Ac- 
cording to this story, a German drummer called upon a 
Swiss merchant who had been one of his best customers. 
The Swiss was polite but frigid — "I am sorry. I am not 
in the market just now/' Again and again the German 
begged for an order — half an order — a quarter of an order 
of the old-time size. Finally he stared the obdurate mer- 
chant coldly in the eye and said : "So ! You think because 
we have carried out our doctrine of military necessity, that 
we are savages, devils, all that sort of thing !" 

"No, no ! Not at all !" was the reply, born of the caution 
of a man who lives next door to Germany. 

"Well, you think so, anyway. You have been influenced 
by English propaganda. All right — no matter. I will 
prove to you that we are not devils. Have 3^ou any one in 
any of our prison camps in whom you are interested ?" 

The Swiss hesitated, remembered his wife's nephew. 
"Yes," he answered, and named man and camp. 



288 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

"All right," was the amazing reply. "Give me your word 
that when the boy comes back, yon will give me half as big 
an order as yon did last time, and Fll see that he is re- 
leased." 

Not ten days later the boy's joyful exclamations over 
the telephone from another Swiss city proved the drum- 
mer's ability to carry out his promise. 

If Germany will go to the length of using prisoners of 
war as a bribe to win back vanished trade, to what lengths 
will her subtlety and skill not go in establishing new con- 
nections the world over? Until the Allied Powers thor- 
oughly realize and value her psychology, until they wake 
up to the need of exhaustive preparation for "economic 
strategy" of their own as an advance measure, the future 
will remain uncertain. Any waiting, any putting off of the 
formulation of the bases of peace is folly of the blindest 
sort. The mere resisting of the German arms has brought 
no decisive victory. The mere refusal at the treaty table 
to give Germany what she will demand will get the world 
nowhere. 

But it is quite possible to develop a political and ec- 
onomic strategy before the day of protocols arrives: to be 
ready with such a plan that when Germany appears at the 
table, we can say to her: "You are beaten. You have no 
terms to propose to which we will listen. This is our pro- 
posal. Accept it, lay down your arms for good, or be out- 
lawed definitely until you acquire common sense." 

Against such an attitude there is no possible rebuttal. 



THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT— 289 

Moreover, such an attitude on the part of the Allies is no 
wicked, selfish, individual desire to play the hog. It is the 
controlling of the world by the majority for the good of the 
majority. No one thinks of disputing the laws that refuse 
to permit arson or the running at large of mad dogs. The 
man who proposed to upset such statutes would properly 
be adjudged of unsound mind. Correspondingly, the indi- 
vidual nation that has tried to upset the machinery which 
makes life possible for all the rest of mankind, must be re- 
strained. In previous wars the making of peace was com- 
paratively simple because both the times were different and 
all the men involved were more or less human beings. To- 
day the civilized world must make peace with a people who, 
no matter how thoroughly they may have been whipped 
into submission, will still retain a goodly percentage of the 
educated devil who can not be trusted even when chained. 
So peace to be peace must take account of a far longer 
and infinitely more complex future than ever men dreamed 
of before. 

Whatever the new world to be born there on the treaty 
table is going to be, the Allies must be united in the de- 
cision that they shall be its parents and its educators and 
trainers. No other course is possible. But that course, 
whatever material form its doctrines take, will not be pos- 
sible until the public opinion of America is thoroughly 
awakened and aroused to the need of preparation for ex- 
actly that emergency. In other words, America must real- 
ize, as most of Europe has already realized, the vital fact 



290 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

that a definite and cohesive control of all opportunities, 
wherever and whatever they be, by organized society for its 
own good, automatically does away with war and outbreaks 
of violence. 

With all this in mind, we must not forget that the peace 
to come can not be either a just peace or a retributive one : 
not just, in the sense that a just peace would annihilate 
the whole martial Germany, root and branch; not retribu- 
tive, in that it can not — perhaps I should say, will not — en- 
force conditions to which no people would accede. But it 
will have to be the sort of peace which takes small account 
of the selfish desires and personal ambitions of personages 
and kings and military or political leaders: a peace that 
will be the surge of humanity, ruthless and implacable to- 
ward injustice and inhumanity. It must be the sort of 
peace — and every awakened soldier of all the millions 
knows it — that will satisfy and be permanent because it 
must be based upon right and honor and truth, not upon 
mere violence and the wilful exercise of power. 

Peace — and what then? 

Why, then we shall be only verging upon the threshold 
of a conflict whose limits are limitless, whose field is the 
world. On every hand the signs are plain of the reactions 
of the popular imagination to every phase of this post- 
bellum struggle. But we still need to see the necessity for 
breadth — the greatest possible breadth — in the programs 
of commercial adjustment and the political and social re- 
organization and betterment soon to come. Reconstruction, 



THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT— 291 

always the aftermath of war, means more to-day than ever, 
for it indicates the arising of a world-wide situation so full 
of menace that every man and woman must be not only cool 
of judgment but open of heart and mind. What happens 
here in America will be echoed and re-echoed in Europe; 
what happens there will profoundly influence the United 
States. We may avoid the "entangling" alliances of history, 
but we can no more avoid influencing or being influenced 
than we can hold aloof from the world and expect to go on 
living. 

That this readjustment and amelioration can be effected 
without friction is to presuppose intellect and intelligence 
of superhuman quality. The whole social structure is go- 
ing to be, not torn down, let us hope, but remodeled and re- 
built from cellar to attic. Necessarily whole nations will 
be incommoded, frightened, perhaps even injured seriously 
in a material sense, with the consequence of many panicky 
objections and balkings which will merely delay what can 
not possibly be deterred or prevented. Things which are 
dispensable will clutter the path at first with their boul- 
ders, but a new public opinion will gradually put them 
courageously to one side, whatever the effort and cost, and 
hew straight to the line. The work will be slow and hard, 
and privilege — whether corporate or proletarian— will put 
up as stiff a fight as the armed enemy. 

It will be useless. If every one could only realize that 
the war has merely hastened and crystallized all the domes- 
tic and international unrest of the past twenty years or 



292 WITH THREE ARMIES 

more, how much easier the work would be ! We are think- 
ing and talking to-day of things as commonplaces which 
were undreamed of even five years ago. Russia swept liquor 
out with a stroke of the pen, and the world stood amazed 
at such a miracle. To-day we nod undisturbed approval 
when the United States calmly appropriates railroads, fac- 
tories, food supplies, tells us what we may eat, what we 
must do, how much of our surplus funds we must surren- 
der. And this new nationalization, this control of in- 
dustries and utilities now worked solely for the public weal, 
will probably not be quickly given over when peace comes. 
Instead, we shall perhaps see a still further regulation of 
life and society. 

By this I must not in any way be understood as a cham- 
pion of socialism who looks forward to any permanently 
radical departure from the inescapable laws of equilibrium 
and the human factor. It is simply that the logic of cir- 
cumstances demands experimenting, and we seem likely to 
go upon the political and economic vivisection table for 
lack of accurate knowledge of what to do. When the more 
or less painful operation and convalescence are survived, we 
shall know, and quite definitely, to what extent the experi- 
ment has proved beneficial. Our only fear need be of the 
enthusiasm the vivisectors may display. They may begin 
on an inflamed tonsil and end by slitting out the national 
appendix — an operation not actually called for, but offer- 
ing irresistible temptation while the knives are yet sharp 
and the anesthetics effective. 



;i ' ;: *5S 



lis 



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11 






X 






THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT— 293 

Yet there is one reassuring feature in the outlook. From 
our very beginning we have never yet taken a false, back- 
ward step. Our progress has always been true progress, 
always a steady going forward. Whenever crisis has come, 
the decision of the country has been both wise politically 
and right morally. Surely, with all that the marvelous 
nineteenth century has contributed to our intelligence in 
the twentieth, we can not discount the lessons of history 
and look forward to turning back ! 



/ .■■*?*■'■ / 



CHAPTEE XIX 

WILL THE END CROWN THE WORE!? 

"Once upon a time/ 5 as the fairy tales begin, there was 
a poet. He had soul and imagination enough — as all poets 
should have — to look through a spring rainstorm and see 
something more than the drops of water which merely wet 
the average man. So he sang blithely — ■ 

"It isn't raining rain to me, 
It's raining violets l" 

Men have dreamed since the days of Adam's apple, and 
though it is not given to all of us to see the violets in the 
downpour, as the poet saw them, we are dreaming now, the 
world over, of something apparently as impossible three or 
four years ago as a rain of violets. The tighter we cling to 
our dream of a millennium coming out of holocaust, and the 
more intangible the vision seems, or the flimsier the stuff 
of which it is made, the stronger and more tangible it be- 
comes; the dream of fantasy becoming the waking dream, 
the day-dream, and gradually the reality whose accom- 
plishment is fully within our human grasp. 

A century ago the French masses dreamed in terms of 
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and though the dreams these 
words inspired have never yet been fully realized, their es- 

294 



WILL THE END CEOWN THE WOEK? 295 

sence has profoundly modified the constitution of modern 
society. And yet, when one looks back at the horrors of that 
period — the world, apparently, never takes a forward stride 
except through blood — it must seem to every thoughtful 
student that notwithstanding the aims of the revolutionists 
were spiritual, the results they obtained were largely mate- 
rial. Though the people of the world quickly learned they 
possessed certain inalienable rights aside from those un- 
graciously conceded by their rulers, they failed through 
their own ineptitude to exercise these newly-won powers 
and forces to the full. 

To-day we are faced with certain analogies. The old 
regime of social injustice with its economic unrest has fes- 
tered itself to a head. After the war is over, these old 
things must go; will go, with more or less violence, as we 
develop wisdom and foresight. And this time we can not 
suffer ineptitude to hamper the results. The one vital 
question we must answer for the sake of posterity is not as 
to material changes — big and important as these have be- 
come, even to the threatening of national well-being — but 
how far the new spirit to be evoked after the war will be 
genuinely spiritual and correspondingly efficient for future 
peace. 

On a purely material basis a very satisfactory arrange- 
ment could be made even now, while the blood still trickles 
from Germany's vicious hands — satisfactory, that is, for 
the time being to a world sick at heart and weary beyond 
expression of fighting. Twenty years or so hence would 



296 WITH THEEE ARMIES 

see all civilization strangled by those same vicious hands. 
What men hope for and dream of to-day is no such chimer- 
ical peace as that, no such gross solution of a problem in- 
soluble by the familiar formulae of secret diplomacy and 
spheres of influence, etc. We must have something more, 
something better, something higher — a peace founded upon 
the more vital things and recognizing, not States or King- 
doms or debatable figures of armament and commercial re- 
sources, but metaphysical resources measured in terms of 
soul. The war has shown baldly, horridly, the failure of 
the physical to dominate the spiritual. 

The German guns that blasted the forts of Liege and 
Naniur out of existence and slaughtered their garrisons or 
turned, them into gibbering idiots, could not extinguish the 
spirit of heroic Belgium. The long-continued onslaughts 
about Verdun, where six hundred thousand German soldiers 
reached the goal and found it a gravestone, never for a mo- 
ment threw the magnificent spirit of France into either 
panic or retreat. The sinking of the Lusitania and the 
Sussex merely recruited the British Navy, and fired its men 
anew with the spirit that never dies. So arms are a failure 
against the intangible soul which men know better to-day 
than they ever did before — and without the aid of dogma 
or canonical precept. 

And the civil population has rediscovered its soul; is 
digging it out of its encrusting selfishness and ignorance. 
There is ample practical demonstration of this on every 
hand. Never in history have the things been done for sol- 



WILL THE END CROWN THE WORK? 297 

diers and sailors that are being done to-day. Who ever 
heard before of "Smileage Books/ 7 or libraries, or Y. M. 
C. A. huts on the present scale, or the thousand other 
things the youth of to-day in the new American Army 
have provided for them at practically no cost to themselves ? 
Who ever heard of such moral and spiritual safeguards as 
surround these boys of to-day? In 1898 the men took 
care of themselves or they were not cared for. Their amuse- 
ments and leaves were not censored. A man in uniform 
could drink so long as he could pay. Nobody dreamed of 
obliterating vicious influences within five miles of the 
camps. If somebody had suggested a Y. M. C. A. hut as 
a necessity, there would have been a howl of protest from 
the men against what they would have considered an en- 
deavor to ram religion down their throats, willy-nilly. 
Moreover, the Spanish War soldier would have regarded 
such things as attempts to "baby" him, to make him a 
mollycoddle, and he would have resented them with a fiery 
consciousness of his own virility and pride. 

The drafted American of 1917 has no such false senti- 
ment. The drift of our American civilization has been, 
however little we recognized it, steadily in the right direc- 
tion. The consequence is inevitable. The soldier of the 
present is no less splendidly virile and self-reliant, no less 
imbued with courage and intelligence, than his brother of 
twenty years ago. But he will emerge from the struggle, 
not merely physically more a man than when he entered, 
but with a finer and stronger spiritual nature because of 



298 WITH THREE ARMIES 

these very influences which, at first, did come as a shock to 
many of us who had not realized fully the growth and de- 
velopment of the national spirit. In 1898 the man who 
went in a day laborer came out a day laborer. In 1918, 
the man who goes in a ditch-digger may come out a first- 
class artisan or engineer or even a theologian full of poetry ! 
Many of the Allied soldiers have already come out of the 
contest with amazingly changed vocations as well as new 
souls, shining and clean, from which the dross of their old 
ones has been thoroughly purged. 

Some of us have seen for ourselves, all of us have been 
told, that the men in the lines are thinking constantly 
about the essentials of life. But what are these essentials? 
How may we distinguish them so clearly from the non- 
essentials that we need never confuse the two ? Is there any 
necromancer's formula by which the slowest-witted dolt can 
be made to comprehend and act upon them ? There is ! and 
every man has that necromancy within himself. Essentials 
— what are they but home, country, fraternity, God ? What 
man is there among the soldiers who is not willing to make 
the ultimate sacrifice to save his family from the hideous 
fate that overtook the luckless families of Belgium and 
Serbia, Poland and northern France? What man is there 
among them who does not understand that his country and 
what it stands for means more to him than life itself? 
What man is there among them not alive to the interde- 
pendence of nations, to the vital necessity that each under- 
stand and help the other? What man is there among 



WILL THE END CROWN THE WORK? 299 

them who has stood under the living hell made by the guns, 
or bowed his head over some fiendish atrocity, without 
reaching out for God? 

The vast starry spaces of the night, the endless hours 
under freezing rain in an exposed L. P. (Listening Post) 
out beyond the wire, the nerve-stretching days of waiting 
in support trenches, and the crouching agonies of trying 
to make a tin hat cover one's whole enormous body when 
the trench is going up in volcanic outbursts, have com- 
pletely reconstructed the men's minds and ideas. The class 
distinctions that applied in those peaceful days when the 
muleteer would not have hobnobbed with the gentleman 
have vanished automatically, and between men the only 
class distinction remaining is one of spirit, the only consid- 
eration one of devotion to duty and personal courage. 
ITnder such conditions the individual, 

"Cook's son, duke's son, son of a belted earl" 

sees his fellow soldier not as Private This or Captain That, 
not as an ex-farrier or clerk or leisurely "high-roller" with 
a fraternity pin and an A. B., but as a human being with 
the same very human emotions and capacities as his own. 
And all these men have realized through the cannon's 
mouth what no preaching or teaching could have made 
them see — that this war is more of a moral upheaval than 
anything else. They have reacted to it accordingly. The 
men in the Allied trenches have no illusions as to a "sordid 
war of commerce" or capitalism. They have come to under- 



300 WITH THREE ARMIES 

stand the difference between themselves and their enemies : 
the abysmal gulf between the State they represent and the 
State represented by their foes; on the one hand, protag- 
onists of a civilization which teaches that the individual is 
above the State, which exists for him; on the other, the 
driven cattle who know they exist only for the glorification 
and use of their State and Sovereign. 

The moment when the onrush of genuine democracy can 
no longer be stayed, is coming. And it will be not merely 
a talkative and vapid democracy for show purposes, but the 
deep-seated, God-given democracy whose terms were out- 
lined on a green hill in Palestine nineteen hundred and 
some odd years ago in the Sermon on the Mount. Until 
this war began such a dream was flimsy and vaporous. No 
one could see how such an idealized condition was to be 
brought about, if ever. The air was surcharged continually 
with thunder and saber rattlings here and there, while the 
prophets and the Church were "clouds without water." The 
spiritual atmosphere was full of haze, an unkind haze that 
veiled the abyss right ahead. 

The conflict has cleared all that away. The Church, 
which was being slowly strangled and desiccated, has been 
quickened and inspired. Religion is no longer a matter of 
the acceptance of man-made creeds, of lip-service without 
comprehension, of the strait ecclesiasticism the past has 
proved not to have the marrow men 3'earned for whenever 
they listened at all to its message. Religion now means a 



WILL THE END CROWN THE WORK? 301 

simple faith and courageous service that links mankind 
with its God through the understanding of life and its 
promises, through a sense of individual responsibility. Can 
we doubt the result? There can be but one if the revived 
and inspired Church takes wise, firm, clear-sighted ad- 
vantage of the receptive attitude of men to-day. It can not 
fail to lead them — perhaps by millions — out into the light, 
and thus make "democracy safe for the world." And when 
both the world is "safe for democracy" and "democracy 
safe for the world," we shall have a world freed forever 
from the terrible menace of secret diplomacy, of decisions 
of war or peace in the hands of the little groups who 
neither serve nor suffer, of the unnumbered things that for 
ages have made for misery and poverty and helplessness, 
and, worst of all, for perpetual fear. 

Think of what that sort of a world means — without fear! 
A world in which amicable discussion and calm, unbiased 
lav/ control the action of its offspring ; a world in which no 
one may offend the least of his companions in the concert 
of nations because of the stalwarts pledged against such a 
thing ; a world without a single national criminal, because 
international crime will be impossible in its enlightened 
state ! Utopia ? The Millennium ? Not altogether ! But the 
steady onward sweep of a civilization which will gradually 
purify itself, and so become increasingly beneficent, can no 
more be halted now than we can stay the run of the tides. 
Eor this is a tide in itself, "a tide in the affairs of men, 



302 WITH THREE ARMIES 

which, taken at the flood/' will lead to as thorough a sweet- 
ening of national life as battle has led to the sweetening of 
the sonls of the individual soldiers. 

"VVe shall find back of every change which becomes per- 
manent that spiritual force without which no nation can 
ever permanently succeed. "We shall be unable to close our 
eyes to the fact that whatever superstructure of law and 
convention be reared, it will stand upon those eternal prin- 
ciples enunciated by Washington and Lincoln, who saw 
democracy not as an inert thing, but as a living, growing, 
increasingly beautiful principle and ideal, inextinguishable 
and inexpungable. To so lofty a conception nothing is im- 
possible, whether it be international courts, international 
police, international reciprocity and control of the vital 
resources of the world — in a word, international fraternity 
and intimacy. 

And for us of America, who are a democracy already ; for 
us who must terminate the war, give the death-blow to mili- 
tarism and autocracy; for us who already enjoy — without 
much sober thanksgiving, unfortunately — many privileges 
to which Europe is as yet a stranger — what is there for us 
in victory, beyond our physical safety in the years to come ? 

There are two things ; aye, three. There is the establish- 
ing upon so firm a basis that they can never be controverted 
the safety and beneficence of our institutions and form of 
government. By our success, won through young men who 
are both the product and the life of these institutions, we 
shall prove that the State instituted for work and for 



WILL THE END CROWN THE WORK? 303 

peace ; for the sanctity of the home and the right of the in- 
dividual to live his own life without interference, either 
with his fellows or by them ; for the purpose of protecting 
and encouraging and uplifting its individual citizens, is 
the only form of government that can endure. There is, 
in the second place, the joy that comes to every honest soul 
from victory won on behalf of right, with its corresponding 
discipline to his own inmost man, making him abler and 
keener on behalf of the principles for which he has already 
fought, less tolerant of anything subversive of them. And 
last of all there is the stimulus of the new regime and op- 
portunity, to urge every man on to a searching of himself 
and a proving of his abilities to keep pace with the fledg- 
ling soul of his Country. 

We are being reborn in this struggle. The American 
Renaissance dates from 1917. Its power in the world of 
thought, of spiritual achievement, will date from the sign- 
ing of peace. And then we shall see that the joy of libera- 
tion from the menace of all time will make for a reaction so 
tremendous, so far-reaching, so incalculable at present, 
that what it will produce, to what heights it will attain 
through the succeeding years, what inspiring creations of 
both mind and soul it will bring forth, can not be imaged 
by any living man. All this and infinitely more we shall 
see, but — ■ 

We must heat Germany first! 

THE END 



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